BACON

BY

R. W. CHURCH

DEAN OF ST. PAUL'S

HONORARY FELLOW OF ORIEL COLLEGE

ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. 

EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY. 

JOHNSON Leslie Stephen. GIBBON J. C. Morison. SCOTT R. H. Hutton. SHELLEY J. A. Symonds. HUME T. H. Huxley. GOLDSMITH William Black. DEFOE William Minto. BURNS J. C. Shairp. SPENSER R. W. Church. THACKERAY Anthony Trollope. BURKE John Morley. MILTON Mark Pattison. HAWTHORNE Henry James, Jr. SOUTHEY E. Dowden. CHAUCER A. W. Ward. BUNYAN J. A. Froude. COWPER Goldwin Smith. POPE Leslie Stephen. BYRON John Nichol. LOCKE Thomas Fowler. WORDSWORTH F. Myers. DRYDEN G. Saintsbury. LANDOR Sidney Colvin. DE QUINCEY David Masson. LAMB Alfred Ainger. BENTLEY R. C. Jebb. DICKENS A. W. Ward. GRAY E. W. Gosse. SWIFT Leslie Stephen. STERNE H. D. Traill. MACAULAY J. Cotter Morison. FIELDING Austin Dobson. SHERIDAN Mrs. OliphantADDISON W. J. Courthope. BACON R. W. Church. COLERIDGE H. D. Traill. SIR PHILIP SIDNEY J. A. Symonds. KEATS Sidney Colvin. 

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PREFACE. 

In preparing this sketch it is needless to say how deeply I am indebtedto Mr. Spedding and Mr. Ellis, the last editors of Bacon's writings, thevery able and painstaking commentators, the one on Bacon's life, theother on his philosophy. It is impossible to overstate the affectionatecare and high intelligence and honesty with which Mr. Spedding hasbrought together and arranged the materials for an estimate of Bacon'scharacter. In the result, in spite of the force and ingenuity of much ofhis 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 inone of his commonplace books, holds good--"_Par trop se débattre, lavérité se perd_. "[1] But this does not diminish the debt of gratitudewhich all who are interested about Bacon must owe to Mr. Spedding. Iwish also to acknowledge the assistance which I have received from Mr. Gardiner's _History of England_ and Mr. Fowler's edition of the _NovumOrganum_; and not least from M. De Rémusat's work on Bacon, which seemsto me the most complete and the most just estimate both of Bacon'scharacter and work which has yet appeared; though even in this clearand dispassionate survey we are reminded by some misconceptions, strangein M. De Rémusat, how what one nation takes for granted isincomprehensible to its neighbour; and what a gap there is still, evenin matters of philosophy and literature, between the whole Continent andourselves--

 "Penitus toto divisos orbe Britannos. "

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Promus_: edited by Mrs. H. Pott, p. 475. 

CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER I. PAGEEARLY LIFE 1

CHAPTER II. BACON AND ELIZABETH 26

CHAPTER III. BACON AND JAMES I. 55

CHAPTER IV. BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL 77

CHAPTER V. BACON ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND CHANCELLOR 95

CHAPTER VI. BACON'S FALL 118

CHAPTER VII. BACON'S LAST YEARS--1621-1626 149

CHAPTER VIII. BACON'S PHILOSOPHY 168

CHAPTER IX. BACON AS A WRITER 198

BACON. 

CHAPTER I. 

EARLY LIFE. 

The life of Francis Bacon is one which it is a pain to write or to read. It is the life of a man endowed with as rare a combination of noblegifts as ever was bestowed on a human intellect; the life of one withwhom the whole purpose of living and of every day's work was to do greatthings 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 whichshould never fail or dry up; it was the life of a man who had highthoughts of the ends and methods of law and government, and with whomthe general and public good was regarded as the standard by which theuse of public power was to be measured; the life of a man who hadstruggled hard and successfully for the material prosperity and opulencewhich makes work easy and gives a man room and force for carrying outhis purposes. All his life long his first and never-sleeping passion wasthe romantic and splendid ambition after knowledge, for the conquest ofnature and for the service of man; gathering up in himself the spiritand longings and efforts of all discoverers and inventors of the arts, as they are symbolised in the mythical Prometheus. He rose to thehighest place and honour; and yet that place and honour were but thefringe and adornment of all that made him great. It is difficult toimagine a grander and more magnificent career; and his name ranks amongthe few chosen examples of human achievement. And yet it was not only anunhappy life; it was a poor life. We expect that such an overwhelmingweight of glory should be borne up by a character corresponding to it instrength and nobleness. But that is not what we find. No one ever had agreater idea of what he was made for, or was fired with a greater desireto devote himself to it. He was all this. And yet being all this, seeingdeep into man's worth, his capacities, his greatness, his weakness, hissins, he was not true to what he knew. He cringed to such a man asBuckingham. He sold himself to the corrupt and ignominious Government ofJames I. He was willing to be employed to hunt to death a friend likeEssex, guilty, deeply guilty, to the State, but to Bacon the most lovingand generous of benefactors. With his eyes open he gave himself upwithout resistance to a system unworthy of him; he would not see whatwas evil in it, and chose to call its evil good; and he was its firstand most signal victim. 

Bacon has been judged with merciless severity. But he has also beendefended by an advocate whose name alone is almost a guarantee for thejustness of the cause which he takes up, and the innocency of the clientfor whom he argues. Mr. Spedding devoted nearly a lifetime, and all theresources of a fine intellect and an earnest conviction, to make usrevere as well as admire Bacon. But it is vain. It is vain to fightagainst the facts of his life: his words, his letters. "Men are madeup, " says a keen observer, "of professions, gifts, and talents; andalso of _themselves_. "[2] With all his greatness, his splendid genius, his magnificent ideas, his enthusiasm for truth, his passion to be thebenefactor of his kind; with all the charm that made him loved by goodand worthy friends, amiable, courteous, patient, delightful as acompanion, ready to take any trouble--there was in Bacon's "self" a deepand fatal flaw. He was a pleaser of men. There was in him that subtlefault, noted and named both by philosophy and religion in the [Greek:areskos] of Aristotle, the [Greek: anthrôpareskos] of St. Paul, which ismore common than it is pleasant to think, even in good people, but whichif it becomes dominant in a character is ruinous to truth and power. Hewas one of the men--there are many of them--who are unable to releasetheir imagination from the impression of present and immediate power, face to face with themselves. It seems as if he carried into conduct theleading rule of his philosophy of nature, _parendo vincitur_. In bothworlds, moral and physical, he felt himself encompassed by vast forces, irresistible by direct opposition. Men whom he wanted to bring round tohis purposes were as strange, as refractory, as obstinate, asimpenetrable as the phenomena of the natural world. It was no useattacking in front, and by a direct trial of strength, people likeElizabeth or Cecil or James; he might as well think of forcing somenatural power in defiance of natural law. The first word of his teachingabout nature is that she must be won by observation of her tendenciesand demands; the same radical disposition of temper reveals itself inhis dealings with men: they, too, must be won by yielding to them, byadapting himself to their moods and ends; by spying into the drift oftheir humour, by subtly and pliantly falling in with it, by circuitousand indirect processes, the fruit of vigilance and patient thought. Hethought to direct, while submitting apparently to be directed. But hemistook his strength. Nature and man are different powers, and underdifferent laws. He chose to please man, and not to follow what his soulmust have told him was the better way. He wanted, in his dealings withmen, that sincerity on which he insisted so strongly in his dealingswith nature and knowledge. And the ruin of a great life was theconsequence. 

Francis Bacon was born in London on the 22d of January, 1560/61, threeyears before Galileo. He was born at York House, in the Strand; thehouse which, though it belonged to the Archbishops of York, had beenlately tenanted by Lord Keepers and Lord Chancellors, in which Baconhimself afterwards lived as Lord Chancellor, and which passed after hisfall into the hands of the Duke of Buckingham, who has left his mark inthe Water Gate which is now seen, far from the river, in the garden ofthe Thames Embankment. His father was Sir Nicholas Bacon, Elizabeth'sfirst Lord Keeper, the fragment of whose 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 William Cecil who was to be LordBurghley. His mother, the sister of Lady Cecil, was one of the daughtersof Sir Antony Cook, a person deep in the confidence of the reformingparty, who had been tutor of Edward VI. She was a remarkable woman, highly accomplished after the fashion of the ladies of her party, and aswould become her father's daughter and the austere and laborious familyto which she belonged. She was "exquisitely skilled in the Greek andLatin tongues;" she was passionately religious, according to theuncompromising religion which the exiles had brought back with them fromGeneva, Strasburg, and Zurich, and which saw in Calvin's theology asolution of all the difficulties, and in his discipline a remedy for allthe evils, of mankind. This means that his boyhood from the first waspassed among the high places of the world--at one of the greatest crisesof English history--in the very centre and focus of its agitations. Hewas brought up among the chiefs and leaders of the rising religion, inthe houses of the greatest and most powerful persons of the State, andnaturally, as their child, at times in the Court of the Queen, who jokedwith him, and called him "her young Lord Keeper. " It means also that thereligious atmosphere in which he was brought up was that of the nascentand aggressive Puritanism, which was not satisfied with the compromisesof the Elizabethan Reformation, and which saw in the moral poverty andincapacity of many of its chiefs a proof against the great traditionalsystem of the Church which Elizabeth was loath to part with, and which, in spite of all its present and inevitable shortcomings, her politicalsagacity taught her to reverence and trust. 

At the age of twelve he was sent to Cambridge, and put under Whitgift atTrinity. It is a question which recurs continually to readers aboutthose times and their precocious boys, what boys were then? For whateverwas the learning of the universities, these boys took their place withmen and consorted with them, sharing such knowledge as men had, andperforming exercises and hearing lectures according to the standard ofmen. Grotius at eleven was the pupil and companion of Scaliger and thelearned band of Leyden; at fourteen he was part of the company whichwent with the ambassadors of the States-General to Henry IV. ; at sixteenhe was called to the bar, he published an out-of-the-way Latin writer, Martianus Capella, with a learned commentary, and he was thecorrespondent of De Thou. When Bacon was hardly sixteen he was admittedto the Society of "Ancients" of Gray's Inn, and he went in the householdof Sir Amyas Paulet, the Queen's Ambassador, to France. He thus spenttwo years in France, not in Paris alone, but at Blois, Tours, andPoitiers. If this was precocious, there is no indication that it wasthought precocious. It only meant that clever and promising boys wereearlier associated with men in important business than is customary now. The old and the young heads began to work together sooner. Perhaps theyfelt that there was less time to spare. In spite of instances oflongevity, life was shorter for the average of busy men, for theconditions of life were worse. 

Two recollections only have been preserved of his early years. One isthat, as he told his chaplain, Dr. Rawley, late in life, he haddiscovered, as far back as his Cambridge days, the "unfruitfulness" ofAristotle's method. It is easy to make too much of this. It is notuncommon for undergraduates to criticise their text-books; it was thefashion with clever men, as, for instance, Montaigne, to talk againstAristotle without knowing anything about him; it is not uncommon for menwho have worked out a great idea to find traces of it, on precariousgrounds, in their boyish thinking. Still, it is worth noting that Baconhimself believed that his fundamental quarrel with Aristotle had begunwith the first efforts of thought, and that this is the one recollectionremaining of his early tendency in speculation. The other is moretrustworthy, and exhibits that inventiveness which was characteristicof his mind. He tells us in the _De Augmentis_ that when he was inFrance he occupied himself with devising an improved system ofcypher-writing--a thing of daily and indispensable use for rivalstatesmen and rival intriguers. But the investigation, with its call onthe calculating and combining faculties, would also interest him, as anexample of the discovery of new powers by the human mind. 

In the beginning of 1579 Bacon, at eighteen, was called home by hisfather's death. This was a great blow to his prospects. His father hadnot accomplished what he had intended for him, and Francis Bacon wasleft with only a younger son's "narrow portion. " What was worse, he lostone whose credit would have served him in high places. He entered onlife, not as he might have expected, independent and with court favouron his side, but with his very livelihood to gain--a competitor at thebottom of the ladder for patronage and countenance. This great change inhis fortunes told very unfavourably on his happiness, his usefulness, and, it must be added, on his character. He accepted it, indeed, manfully, and at once threw himself into the study of the law as theprofession by which he was to live. But the law, though it was the onlypath open to him, was not the one which suited his genius, or his objectin life. To the last he worked hard and faithfully, but with doubtfulreputation as to his success, and certainly against the grain. And thiswas not the worst. To make up for the loss of that start in life ofwhich his father's untimely death had deprived him, he became, foralmost the rest of his life, the most importunate and most untiring ofsuitors. 

In 1579 or 1580 Bacon took up his abode at Gray's Inn, which for a longtime was his home. He went through the various steps of his profession. He began, what he never discontinued, his earnest and humble appeals tohis relative the great Lord Burghley, to employ him in the Queen'sservice, or to put him in some place of independence: through LordBurghley's favour he seems to have been pushed on at his Inn, where, in1586, he was a Bencher; and in 1584 he came into Parliament for MelcombeRegis. He took some small part in Parliament; but the only record of hisspeeches is contained in a surly note of Recorder Fleetwood, who writesas an old member might do of a young one talking nonsense. He sat againfor Liverpool in the year of the Armada (1588), and his name begins toappear in the proceedings. These early years, we know, were busy ones. In them Bacon laid the foundation of his observations and judgments onmen and affairs; and in them the great purpose and work of his life wasconceived and shaped. But they are more obscure years than might havebeen expected in the case of a man of Bacon's genius and family, and ofsuch eager and unconcealed desire to rise and be at work. No doubt hewas often pinched in his means; his health was weak, and he was delicateand fastidious in his care of it. Plunged in work, he lived very much asa recluse in his chambers, and was thought to be reserved, and whatthose who disliked him called arrogant. But Bacon wasambitious--ambitious, in the first place, of the Queen's notice andfavour. He was versatile, brilliant, courtly, besides being his father'sson; and considering how rapidly bold and brilliant men were able topush their way and take the Queen's favour by storm, it seems strangethat Bacon should have remained fixedly in the shade. Something musthave kept him back. Burghley was not the man to neglect a usefulinstrument with such good will to serve him. But all that Mr. Spedding's industry and profound interest in the subject has broughttogether throws but an uncertain light on Bacon's long disappointment. Was it the rooted misgiving of a man of affairs like Burghley at thatpassionate contempt of all existing knowledge, and that undoubtingconfidence in his own power to make men know, as they never had known, which Bacon was even now professing? Or was it something soft andover-obsequious in character which made the uncle, who knew well whatmen he wanted, disinclined to encourage and employ the nephew? WasFrancis not hard enough, not narrow enough, too full of ideas, too muchalive to the shakiness of current doctrines and arguments on religionand policy? Was he too open to new impressions, made by objections orrival views? Or did he show signs of wanting backbone to stand amiddifficulties and threatening prospects? Did Burghley see something inhim of the pliability which he could remember as the serviceable qualityof his own young days--which suited those days of rapid change, but notdays when change was supposed to be over, and when the qualities whichwere wanted were those which resist and defy it? The only thing that isclear 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 toprepare those carefully-written papers on the public affairs of the day, of which he has left a good many. In our day they would have beenpamphlets or magazine articles. In his they were circulated inmanuscript, and only occasionally printed. The first of any importanceis a letter of advice to the Queen, about the year 1585, on the policyto be followed with a view to keeping in check the Roman Catholicinterest at home and abroad. It is calm, sagacious, and, according tothe fashion of the age, slightly Machiavellian. But the first subject onwhich Bacon exhibited his characteristic qualities, his appreciation offacts, his balance of thought, and his power, when not personallycommitted, of standing aloof from the ordinary prejudices andassumptions of men round him, was the religious condition and prospectsof the English Church. Bacon had been brought up in a Puritan householdof the straitest sect. His mother was an earnest, severe, and intolerantCalvinist, deep in the interests and cause of her party, bitterlyresenting all attempts to keep in order its pretensions. She was amasterful woman, claiming to meddle with her brother-in-law's policy, and though a most affectionate mother she was a woman of violent andungovernable temper. Her letters to her son Antony, whom she lovedpassionately, but whom she suspected of keeping dangerous and papisticalcompany, show us the imperious spirit in which she claimed to interferewith her sons; and they show also that in Francis she did not find allthe deference which she looked for. Recommending Antony to frequent "thereligious exercises of the sincerer sort, " she warns him not to followhis brother's advice or example. Antony was advised to use prayer twicea day with his servants. "Your brother, " she adds, "is too negligenttherein. " She is anxious about Antony's health, and warns him not tofall into his brother's ill-ordered habits: "I verily think yourbrother's weak stomach to digest hath been much caused and confirmed byuntimely going to bed, and then musing _nescio quid_ when he shouldsleep, and then in consequent by late rising and long lying in bed, whereby his men are made slothful and himself continueth sickly. But mysons haste not to hearken to their mother's good counsel in time toprevent. " It seems clear that Francis Bacon had shown his mother thatnot only in the care of his health, but in his judgment on religiousmatters, he meant to go his own way. Mr. Spedding thinks that she musthave had much influence on him; it seems more likely that he resentedher interference, and that the hard and narrow arrogance which she readinto the Gospel produced in him a strong reaction. Bacon was obsequiousto the tyranny of power, but he was never inclined to bow to the tyrannyof opinion; and the tyranny of Puritan infallibility was the last thingto which he was likely to submit. His mother would have wished him tosit under Cartwright and Travers. The friend of his choice was theAnglican preacher, Dr. Andrewes, to whom he submitted all his works, andwhom he called his "inquisitor general;" and he was proud to signhimself the pupil of Whitgift, and to write for him--the archbishop ofwhom Lady Bacon wrote to her son Antony, veiling the dangerous sentimentin Greek, "that he was the ruin of the Church, for he loved his ownglory more than Christ's. "

Certainly, in the remarkable paper on _Controversies in the Church_(1589), Bacon had ceased to feel or to speak as a Puritan. The paper isan attempt to compose the controversy by pointing out the mistakes injudgment, in temper, and in method on both sides. It is entirely unlikewhat a Puritan would have written: it is too moderate, too tolerant, tooneutral, though like most essays of conciliation it is open to therejoinder from both sides--certainly from the Puritan--that it begs thequestion by assuming the unimportance of the matters about which eachcontended with so much zeal. It is the confirmation, but also thecomplement, and in some ways the correction of Hooker's contemporaryview of the quarrel which was threatening the life of the EnglishChurch, and not even Hooker could be so comprehensive and so fair. ForHooker had to defend much that was indefensible: he had to defend agreat traditional system, just convulsed by a most tremendous shock--ashock and alteration, as Bacon says, "the greatest and most dangerousthat can be in a State, " in which old clews and habits and rules wereconfused and all but lost; in which a frightful amount of personalincapacity and worthlessness had, from sheer want of men, risen to thehigh places of the Church; and in which force and violence, sometimes ofthe most hateful kind, had come to be accepted as ordinary instrumentsin the government of souls. Hooker felt too strongly the unfairness, thefolly, the intolerant aggressiveness, the malignity of his opponents--hewas too much alive to the wrongs inflicted by them on his own side, andto the incredible absurdity of their arguments--to do justice to whatwas only too real in the charges and complaints of those opponents. ButBacon came from the very heart of the Puritan camp. He had seen theinside of Puritanism--its best as well as its worst side. He witnessesto the humility, the conscientiousness, the labour, the learning, thehatred of sin and wrong, of many of its preachers. He had heard, andheard with sympathy, all that could be urged against the bishops'administration, and against a system of legal oppression in the name ofthe Church. Where religious elements were so confusedly mixed, and whereeach side had apparently so much to urge on behalf of its claims, he sawthe deep mistake of loftily ignoring facts, and of want of patience andforbearance with those who were scandalised at abuses, while the abuses, in some cases monstrous, were tolerated and turned to profit. Towardsthe bishops and their policy, though his language is very respectful, for the government was implicated, he is very severe. They punish andrestrain, but they do not themselves mend their ways or supply what waswanting; and theirs are "_injuriæ potentiorum_"--"injuries come fromthem that have the upperhand. " But Hooker himself did not put his fingermore truly and more surely on the real mischief of the Puritan movement:on the immense outbreak in it of unreasonable party spirit and visiblepersonal ambition--"these are the true successors of Diotrephes and notmy lord bishops"--on the gradual development of the Puritan theory tillit came at last to claim a supremacy as unquestionable and intolerant asthat of the Papacy; on the servile affectation of the fashions of Genevaand Strasburg; on the poverty and foolishness of much of the Puritanteaching--its inability to satisfy the great questions which it raisedin the soul, its unworthy dealing with Scripture--"naked examples, conceited inferences, and forced allusions, which mine into allcertainty of religion"--"the word, the bread of life, they toss up anddown, they break it not;" on their undervaluing of moral worth, if itdid not speak in their phraseology--"as they censure virtuous men by thenames of _civil_ and _moral_, so do they censure men truly and godlywise, who see into the vanity of their assertions, by the name of_politiques_, saying that their wisdom is but carnal and savouring ofman's brain. " Bacon saw that the Puritans were aiming at a tyrannywhich, if they established it, would be more comprehensive, moresearching, and more cruel than that of the older systems; but he thoughtit a remote and improbable danger, and that they might safely betolerated for the work they did in education and preaching, "because thework of exhortation doth chiefly rest upon these men, and they have azeal and hate of sin. " But he ends by warning them lest "that be truewhich one of their adversaries said, _that they have but two smallwants--knowledge and love_. " One complaint that he makes of them is acurious instance of the changes of feeling, or at least of language, onmoral subjects. He accuses them of "having pronounced generally, andwithout difference, all untruths unlawful, " forgetful of the Egyptianmidwives, and Rahab, and Solomon, and even of Him "who, the more totouch the hearts of the disciples with a holy dalliance, made as thoughhe would have passed Emmaus. " He is thinking of their failure to apply aprinciple which was characteristic of his mode of thought, that even astatement about a virtue like veracity "hath limit as all things elsehave;" but it is odd to find Bacon bringing against the Puritans theconverse of the charge which his age, and Pascal afterwards, broughtagainst the Jesuits. The essay, besides being a picture of the times asregards religion, is an example of what was to be Bacon's characteristicstrength and weakness: his strength in lifting up a subject which hadbeen degraded by mean and wrangling disputations, into a higher andlarger light, and bringing to bear on it great principles and theresults of the best human wisdom and experience, expressed in weightyand pregnant maxims; his weakness in forgetting, as, in spite of hisphilosophy, he so often did, that the grandest major premises needwell-proved and ascertained minors, and that the enunciation of aprinciple is not the same thing as the application of it. Doubtlessthere is truth in his closing words; but each party would have made thecomment that what he had to prove, and had not proved, was that byfollowing his counsel they would "love the whole world better than apart. "

 "Let them not fear . .. The fond calumny of _neutrality_; but let them know that is true which is said by a wise man, _that neuters in contentions are either better or worse than either side_. These things have I in all sincerity and simplicity set down touching the controversies which now trouble the Church of England; and that without all art and insinuation, and therefore not like to be grateful to either part. Notwithstanding, I trust what has been said shall find a correspondence in their minds which are not embarked in partiality, and which _love the whole letter than a part_"

Up to this time, though Bacon had showed himself capable of taking abroad and calm view of questions which it was the fashion among goodmen, and men who were in possession of the popular ear, to treat withnarrowness and heat, there was nothing to disclose his deeperthoughts--nothing foreshadowed the purpose which was to fill his life. He had, indeed, at the age of twenty-five, written a "youthful"philosophical essay, to which he gave the pompous title "_TemporisPartus Maximus_, " "the Greatest Birth of Time. " But he was thirty-onewhen we first find an indication of the great idea and the greatprojects which were to make his name famous. This indication iscontained in an earnest appeal to Lord Burghley for some help whichshould not be illusory. Its words are distinct and far-reaching, andthey are the first words from him which tell us what was in his heart. The letter has the interest to us of the first announcement of a promisewhich, to ordinary minds, must have appeared visionary and extravagant, but which was so splendidly fulfilled; the first distant sight of thatsea of knowledge which henceforth was opened to mankind, but on which noman, as he thought, had yet entered. It contains the famous avowal--"_Ihave taken all knowledge to be my province_"--made in the confidenceborn of long and silent meditations and questionings, but made in asimple 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 correspondence unto me and my poor estate can breed in a man, do I commend myself unto your Lordship. I wax now somewhat ancient: one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour glass. My health, 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 wholly), but as a man born 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 frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious 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 did, who reduced himself with contemplation unto voluntary poverty, but this I 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 pioneer 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 notunfriendly relative, is the key to Bacon's plan of life; which, withnumberless changes of form, he followed to the end. That is, aprofession, steadily, seriously, and laboriously kept to, in order toprovide the means of living; and beyond that, as the ultimate and realend of his life, the pursuit, in a way unattempted before, of allpossible human knowledge, and of the methods to improve it and make itsure and fruitful. And so his life was carried out. On the one hand itwas a continual and pertinacious seeking after government employment, which could give credit to his name and put money in hispocket--attempts by general behaviour, by professional services when theoccasion offered, by putting his original and fertile pen at the serviceof the government, to win confidence, and to overcome the manifestindisposition of those in power to think that a man who cherished thechimera of universal knowledge could be a useful public servant. On theother hand, all the while, in the crises of his disappointment ortriumph, the one great subject lay next his heart, filling him withfire and passion--how really to know, and to teach men to know indeed, and to use their knowledge so as to command nature; the great hope to bethe reformer and restorer of knowledge in a more wonderful sense thanthe world had yet seen in the reformation of learning and religion, andin the spread of civilised order in the great states of the Renaissancetime. To this he gave his best and deepest thoughts; for this he was forever accumulating, and for ever rearranging and reshaping those massesof observation and inquiry and invention and mental criticism which wereto come in as parts of the great design which he had seen in the visionsof his imagination, and of which at last he was only able to leave noblefragments, incomplete after numberless recastings. This was not indeedthe only, but it was the predominant and governing, interest of hislife. Whether as solicitor for Court favour or public office; whetherdrudging at the work of the law or managing State prosecutions; whetherwriting an opportune pamphlet against Spain or Father Parsons, orinventing a "device" for his Inn or for Lord Essex to give amusement toQueen Elizabeth; whether fulfilling his duties as member of Parliamentor rising step by step to the highest places in the Council Board andthe State; whether in the pride of success or under the amazement ofunexpected and irreparable overthrow, while it seemed as if he was onlymeasuring his strength against the rival ambitions of the day, in thesame spirit and with the same object as his competitors, the true motiveof all his eagerness and all his labours was not theirs. He wanted to bepowerful, and still more to be rich; but he wanted to be so, becausewithout power and without money he could not follow what was to him theonly thing worth following on earth--a real knowledge of the amazing andhitherto almost unknown world in which he had to live. Bacon, to us, atleast, at this distance, who can only judge him from partial andimperfect knowledge, often seems to fall far short of what a man shouldbe. He was not one of the high-minded and proud searchers afterknowledge and truth, like Descartes, who were content to accept a frugalindependence so that their time and their thoughts might be their own. Bacon was a man of the world, and wished to live in and with the world. He threatened sometimes retirement, but never with any very seriousintention. In the Court was his element, and there were his hopes. Oftenthere seems little to distinguish him from the ordinary place-hunters, obsequious and selfish, of every age; little to distinguish him from theservile and insincere flatterers, of whom he himself complains, whocrowded the antechambers of the great Queen, content to submit withsmiling face and thankful words to the insolence of her waywardness andtemper, in the hope, more often disappointed than not, of hitting hertaste on some lucky occasion, and being rewarded for the accident by aplace of gain or honour. Bacon's history, as read in his letters, is notan agreeable one; after every allowance made for the fashions oflanguage and the necessities of a suitor, there is too much of insincereprofession of disinterestedness, too much of exaggerated profession ofadmiration and devoted service, too much of disparagement andinsinuation against others, for a man who respected himself. Hesubmitted too much to the miserable conditions of rising which he found. But, nevertheless, it must be said that it was for no mean object, forno mere private selfishness or vanity, that he endured all this. Hestrove hard to be a great man and a rich man. But it was that he mighthave his hands free and strong and well furnished to carry forward thedouble task of overthrowing ignorance and building up the new and solidknowledge on which his heart was set--that immense conquest of nature onbehalf of man which he believed to be possible, and of which he believedhimself to have the key. 

The letter to Lord Burghley did not help him much. He received thereversion of a place, the Clerkship of the Council, which did not becomevacant for twenty years. But these years of service declined and placewithheld were busy and useful ones. What he was most intent upon, andwhat occupied his deepest and most serious thought, was unknown to theworld round him, and probably not very intelligible to his few intimatefriends, such as his brother Antony and Dr. Andrewes. Meanwhile heplaced his pen at the disposal of the authorities, and though theyregarded him more as a man of study than of practice and experience, they were glad to make use of it. His versatile genius found anotheremployment. Besides his affluence in topics, he had the liveliest fancyand most active imagination. But that he wanted the sense of poeticfitness and melody, he might almost be supposed, with his reach and playof thought, to have been capable, as is maintained in some eccentricmodern theories, of writing Shakespeare's plays. No man ever had a moreimaginative power of illustration drawn from the most remote and mostunlikely analogies; analogies often of the quaintest and most unexpectedkind, but often also not only felicitous in application but profound andtrue. His powers were early called upon for some of those sportivecompositions in which that age delighted on occasions of rejoicing orfestival. Three of his contributions to these "devices" have beenpreserved--two of them composed in honour of the Queen, as "triumphs, "offered by Lord Essex, one probably in 1592 and another in 1595; athird for a Gray's Inn revel in 1594. The "devices" themselves were ofthe common type of the time, extravagant, odd, full of awkward allegoryand absurd flattery, and running to a prolixity which must make modernlovers of amusement wonder at the patience of those days; but the"discourses" furnished by Bacon are full of fine observation andbrilliant thought and wit and happy illustration, which, fantastic asthe general conception is, raises them far above the level of suchfugitive trifles. 

Among the fragmentary papers belonging to this time which have comedown, not the least curious are those which throw light on his manner ofworking. While he was following out the great ideas which were to be thebasis of his philosophy, he was as busy and as painstaking in fashioningthe instruments by which they were to be expressed; and in these paperswe have the records and specimens of this preparation. He was a greatcollector of sentences, proverbs, quotations, sayings, illustrations, anecdotes, and he seems to have read sometimes simply to gather phrasesand apt words. He jots down at random any good and pointed remark whichcomes into his thought or his memory; at another time he groups a set ofstock quotations with a special drift, bearing on some subject, such asthe faults of universities or the habits of lawyers. Nothing is toominute 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, ofexcuse or repartee, even morning and evening salutations; he recordsneat and convenient opening and concluding sentences, ways of speakingmore adapted than others to give a special colour or direction to whatthe speaker or writer has to say--all that hook-and-eye work which seemsso trivial and passes so unnoticed as a matter of course, and which yetis often hard to reach, and which makes all the difference betweentameness and liveliness, between clearness and obscurity--all thedifference, not merely to the ease and naturalness, but often to thelogical force of speech. These collections it was his way to sift andtranscribe again and again, adding as well as omitting. From one ofthese, belonging to 1594 and the following years, the _Promus ofFormularies 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 hisaudience heard it, seems the suggestion or recollection of the moment. Bacon was always much more careful of the value or aptness of a thoughtthan of its appearing new and original. Of all great writers he leastminds repeating himself, perhaps in the very same words; so that asimile, an illustration, a quotation pleases him, he returns to it--heis never tired of it; it obviously gives him satisfaction to introduceit again and again. These collections of odds and ends illustrateanother point in his literary habits. His was a mind keenly sensitive toall analogies and affinities, impatient of a strict and rigid logicalgroove, but spreading as it were tentacles on all sides in quest ofchance prey, and quickened into a whole system of imagination by theelectric quiver imparted by a single word, at once the key and symbol ofthe thinking it had led to. And so he puts down word or phrase, soenigmatical to us who see it by itself, which to him would wake up awhole train of ideas, as he remembered the occasion of it--how at acertain time and place this word set the whole moving, seemed tobreathe 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 comecontinually on the results and proofs of this early labour. Some of themost memorable and familiar passages of his writings are to be tracedfrom the storehouses which he filled in these years of preparation. Anexample of this correspondence between the note-book and the compositionis to be seen in a paper belonging to this period, written apparently toform part of a masque, or as he himself calls it, a "Conference ofPleasure, " and entitled the _Praise of Knowledge_. It is interestingbecause it is the first draught which we have from him of some of theleading ideas and most characteristic language about the defects and theimprovement of knowledge, which were afterwards embodied in the_Advancement_ and the _Novum Organum_. The whole spirit and aim of hisgreat reform is summed up in the following fine passage:

 "Facility to believe, impatience to doubt, temerity to assever, 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 _sovereignty of man_ lieth hid in knowledge; wherein many things are reserved which kings with their treasures cannot buy nor with their force command; their spials and intelligencers 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 Knowledge_belongs, also, one in _Praise of the Queen_. As one is an early specimenof his manner of writing on philosophy, so this is a specimen of whatwas equally characteristic of him--his political and historical writing. It is, in form, necessarily a panegyric, as high-flown and adulatory assuch performances in those days were bound to be. But it is not onlyflattery. It fixes with true discrimination on the points in Elizabeth'scharacter and reign which were really subjects of admiration 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 with excellent assurance and advised security she inspired her council, animated her nobility, redoubled the courage of her people; still having this noble apprehension, not only that she would communicate her fortune with them, but that it was she that would protect them, and 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 the vows of conspirators, nor the power of the enemy, is more than heroical. "

These papers, though he put his best workmanship into them, as heinvariably did with whatever he touched, were of an ornamental kind. Buthe did more serious work. In the year 1592 a pamphlet had been publishedon the Continent in Latin and English, _Responsio ad Edictum ReginæAngliæ_, with reference to the severe legislation which followed on theArmada, making such charges against the Queen and the Government as itwas natural for the Roman Catholic party to make, and making them withthe utmost virulence and unscrupulousness. It was supposed to be writtenby the ablest of the Roman pamphleteers, Father Parsons. The Governmentfelt it to be a dangerous indictment, and Bacon was chosen to write theanswer to it. He had additional interest in the matter, for the pamphletmade a special and bitter attack on Burghley, as the person mainlyresponsible for the Queen's policy. Bacon's reply is long and elaborate, taking up every charge, and reviewing from his own point of view thewhole course of the struggle between the Queen and the supporters of theRoman Catholic interest abroad and at home. It cannot be considered animpartial review; besides that it was written to order, no man inEngland could then write impartially in that quarrel; but it is not moreone-sided and uncandid than the pamphlet which it answers, and Bacon isable to recriminate with effect, and to show gross credulity andlooseness of assertion on the part of the Roman Catholic advocate. Butreligion had too much to do with the politics of both sides for eitherto be able to come into the dispute with clean hands: the RomanCatholics meant much more than toleration, and the sanguinarypunishments of the English law against priests and Jesuits were edged bysomething even keener than the fear of treason. But the paper containssome large surveys of public affairs, which probably no one at that timecould write but Bacon. Bacon never liked to waste anything good which hehad written; and much of what he had written in the panegyric in _Praiseof the Queen_ is made use of again, and transferred with little changeto the pages of the _Observations on a Libel_. 

FOOTNOTES:

[2] Dr. Mozley. 

CHAPTER II. 

BACON AND ELIZABETH. 

The last decade of the century, and almost of Elizabeth's reign(1590-1600), was an eventful one to Bacon's fortunes. In it the visionof his great design disclosed itself more and more to his imaginationand hopes, and with more and more irresistible fascination. In it hemade his first literary venture, the first edition of his _Essays_(1597), ten in number, the first-fruits of his early and ever watchfulobservation of men and affairs. These years, too, saw his first steps inpublic life, the first efforts to bring him into importance, the firstgreat trials and tests of his character. They saw the beginning and theysaw the end of his relations with the only friend who, at that time, recognised his genius and his purposes, certainly the only friend whoever pushed his claims; they saw the growth of a friendship which was tohave so tragical a close, and they saw the beginnings and causes of abitter personal rivalry which was to last through life, and which was tobe a potent element hereafter in Bacon's ruin. The friend was the Earlof Essex. The competitor was the ablest, and also the most truculent andunscrupulous of English lawyers, Edward Coke. 

While Bacon, in the shade, had been laying the foundations of hisphilosophy of nature, and vainly suing for legal or politicalemployment, another man had been steadily rising in the Queen's favourand carrying all before him at Court--Robert Devereux, Lord Essex; andwith Essex Bacon had formed an acquaintance which had ripened into anintimate and affectionate friendship. We commonly think of Essex as avain and insolent favourite, who did ill the greatest work given him todo--the reduction of Ireland; who did it ill from some unexplainedreason of spite and mischief; and who, when called to account for it, broke out into senseless and idle rebellion. This was the end. But hewas not always thus. He began life with great gifts and noble ends; hewas a serious, modest, and large-minded student both of books andthings, and he turned his studies to full account. He had imaginationand love of enterprise, which gave him an insight into Bacon's ideassuch as none of Bacon's contemporaries had. He was a man of simple andearnest religion; he sympathized most with the Puritans, because theywere serious and because they were hardly used. Those who most condemnhim acknowledge his nobleness and generosity of nature. Bacon in afterdays, when all was over between them, spoke of him as a man always_patientissimus veri_; "the more plainly and frankly you shall deal withmy lord, " he writes elsewhere, "not only in disclosing particulars, butin giving him _caveats_ and admonishing him of any error which in thisaction he may commit (such is his lordship's nature), the better he willtake it. " "He must have seemed, " says Mr. Spedding, a little toograndly, "in the eyes of Bacon like the hope of the world. " The two men, certainly, became warmly attached. Their friendship came to be one ofthe closest kind, full of mutual services, and of genuine affection onboth sides. It was not the relation of a great patron and usefuldependant; it was, what might be expected in the two men, that ofaffectionate equality. Each man was equally capable of seeing what theother was, and saw it. What Essex's feelings were towards Bacon theresults showed. Bacon, in after years, repeatedly claimed to havedevoted his whole time and labour to Essex's service. Holding him, hesays, to be "the fittest instrument to do good to the State, I appliedmyself to him in a manner which I think rarely happeneth among men;neglecting the Queen's service, mine own fortune, and, in a sort, myvocation, I did nothing but advise and ruminate with myself . .. Anythingthat might concern his lordship's honour, fortune, or service. " Theclaim is far too wide. The "Queen's service" had hardly as yet come muchin Bacon's way, and he never neglected it when it did come, nor his ownfortune or vocation; his letters remain to attest his care in theserespects. 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 wasdesirous 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 ever appearedat Elizabeth's Court, and it seemed as if he were going to be the mostpowerful. Leicester was dead. Burghley was growing old, and indisposedfor the adventures and levity which, with all her grand power of ruling, Elizabeth loved. She needed a favourite, and Essex was unfortunatelymarked out for what she wanted. He had Leicester's fascination, withouthis mean and cruel selfishness. He was as generous, as gallant, as quickto descry all great things in art and life, as Philip Sidney, with morevigour and fitness for active life than Sidney. He had not Raleigh'ssad, dark depths of thought, but he had a daring courage equal toRaleigh's, without Raleigh's cynical contempt for mercy and honour. Hehad every personal advantage requisite for a time when intellect, andready wit, and high-tempered valour, and personal beauty, and skill inaffairs, with equal skill in amusements, were expected to go together inthe accomplished courtier. And Essex was a man not merely to be courtedand admired, to shine and dazzle, but to be loved. Elizabeth, with herstrange and perverse emotional constitution, loved him, if she everloved any one. Every one who served him loved him; and he was, as muchas any one could be in those days, a popular favourite. Under betterfortune he might have risen to a great height of character; inElizabeth's Court he was fated to be ruined. 

For in that Court all the qualities in him which needed control receiveddaily stimulus, and his ardour and high-aiming temper turned intoimpatience and restless irritability. He had a mistress who was at onetime in the humour to be treated as a tender woman, at another as anoutrageous flirt, at another as the haughtiest and most imperious ofqueens; her mood varied, no one could tell how, and it was mostdangerous to mistake it. It was part of her pleasure to find in herfavourite a spirit as high, a humour as contradictory and determined, asher own; it was the charming contrast to the obsequiousness or theprudence of the rest; but no one could be sure at what unlooked-formoment, and how fiercely, she might resent in earnest a display of whatshe had herself encouraged. Essex was ruined for all real greatness byhaving to suit himself to this bewildering and most unwholesome anddegrading waywardness. She taught him to think himself irresistible inopinion and in claims; she amused herself in teaching him how completelyhe was mistaken. Alternately spoiled and crossed, he learned to beexacting, unreasonable, absurd in his pettish resentments or broodingsullenness. He learned to think that she must be dealt with by the samemethods which she herself employed. The effect was not produced in amoment; it was the result of a courtiership of sixteen years. But itended in corrupting a noble nature. Essex came to believe that she whocowed others must be frightened herself; that the stinging injusticewhich led a proud man to expect, only to see how he would behave whenrefused, deserved to be brought to reason by a counter-buffet as roughas her own insolent caprice. He drifted into discontent, intodisaffection, into neglect of duty, into questionable schemings for thefuture of a reign that must shortly end, into criminal methods ofguarding himself, of humbling his rivals and regaining influence. A"fatal impatience, " as Bacon calls it, gave his rivals an advantagewhich, perhaps in self-defence, they could not fail to take; and thatcareer, so brilliant, so full of promise of good, ended in misery, indishonour, in remorse, on the scaffold of the Tower. 

With this attractive and powerful person Bacon's fortunes, in the lastyears of the century, became more and more knit up. Bacon was now pastthirty, Essex a few years younger. In spite of Bacon's apparentadvantage and interest at Court, in spite of abilities, which, thoughhis genius was not yet known, his contemporaries clearly recognised, hewas still a struggling and unsuccessful man: ambitious to rise, for nounworthy reasons, but needy, in weak health, with careless and expensivehabits, and embarrassed with debt. He had hoped to rise by the favour ofthe Queen and for the sake of his father. For some ill-explained reasonhe was to the last disappointed. Though she used him "for matters ofstate and revenue, " she either did not like him, or did not see in himthe servant she wanted to advance. He went on to the last pressing hisuncle, Lord Burghley. He applied in the humblest terms, he made himselfuseful with his pen, he got his mother to write for him; but LordBurghley, probably because he thought his nephew more of a man ofletters than a sound lawyer and practical public servant, did not careto bring him forward. From his cousin, Robert Cecil, Bacon receivedpolite words and friendly assurances. Cecil may have undervalued him, orhave been jealous of him, or suspected him as a friend of Essex; hecertainly gave Bacon good reason to think that his words meant nothing. Except Essex, and perhaps his brother Antony--the most affectionate anddevoted of brothers--no one had yet recognised all that Bacon was. Meanwhile time was passing. The vastness, the difficulties, theattractions of that conquest of all knowledge which he dreamed of, werebecoming greater every day to his thoughts. The law, without which hecould not live, took up time and brought in little. Attendance on theCourt was expensive, yet indispensable, if he wished for place. Hismother 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, whoin that year became a Privy Councillor, determined that Bacon should beAttorney-General. Bacon's reputation as a lawyer was overshadowed by hisphilosophical and literary pursuits. He was thought young for theoffice, and he had not yet served in any subordinate place. And therewas 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 oftongue, who also wanted it. An Attorney-General was one who would bringall the resources and hidden subtleties of English law to the service ofthe Crown, and use them with thorough-going and unflinching resolutionagainst those whom the Crown accused of treason, sedition, or invasionof the prerogative. It is no wonder that the Cecils, and the Queenherself, thought Coke likely to be a more useful public servant thanBacon: it is certain what Coke himself thought about it, and what hisestimate was of the man whom Essex was pushing against him. But Essexdid not take up his friend's cause in the lukewarm fashion in whichBurghley had patronised his nephew. There was nothing that Essex pursuedwith greater pertinacity. He importuned the Queen. He risked withoutscruple offending her. She apparently long shrank from directly refusinghis request. The Cecils were for Coke--the "_Huddler_" as Bacon callshim, in a letter to Essex; but the appointment was delayed. All through1593, and until April, 1594, the struggle went on. 

When Robert Cecil suggested that Essex should be content with theSolicitor's place for Bacon, "praying him to be well advised, for if hisLordship had spoken of that it might have been of easier digestion tothe 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 Robert, " 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 admittance, which Francis Bacon hath more than recompensed with the priority of his reading; in all other respects you shall find no comparison between them. "

But the Queen's disgust at some very slight show of independence onBacon's part in Parliament, unforgiven in spite of repeated apologies, together with the influence of the Cecils and the pressure of soformidable and so useful a man as Coke, turned the scale against Essex. In April, 1594, Coke was made Attorney. Coke did not forget thepretender to law, as he would think him, who had dared so long todispute his claims; and Bacon was deeply wounded. "No man, " he thought, "had ever received a more exquisite disgrace, " and he spoke of retiringto Cambridge "to spend the rest of his life in his studies andcontemplations. " But Essex was not discouraged. He next pressed eagerlyfor the Solicitorship. Again, after much waiting, he was foiled. Aninferior man was put over Bacon's head. Bacon found that Essex, whocould do most things, for some reason could not do this. He himself, too, had pressed his suit with the greatest importunity on the Queen, onBurghley, on Cecil, on every one who could help him; he reminded theQueen how many years ago it was since he first kissed her hand in herservice, and ever since had used his wits to please; but it was all invain. For once he lost patience. He was angry with Essex; the Queen'sanger with Essex had, he thought, recoiled on his friend. He was angrywith the Queen; she held his long waiting cheap; she played with him andamused herself with delay; he would go abroad, and he "knew herMajesty's nature, that she neither careth though the whole surname ofthe Bacons travelled, nor of the Cecils neither. " He was very angrywith Robert Cecil; affecting not to believe them, he tells him storieshe has heard of his corrupt and underhand dealing. He writes almost afarewell letter of ceremonious but ambiguous thanks to Lord Burghley, hoping that he would impute any offence that Bacon might have given tothe "complexion of a suitor, and a tired sea-sick suitor, " and speakingdespairingly of his future success in the law. The humiliations of whata suitor has to go through torment him: "It is my luck, " he writes toCecil, "still to be akin to such things as I neither like in nature norwould willingly meet with in my course, but yet cannot avoid withoutshow of base timorousness or else of unkind or suspicious 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 confidere_. 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 homo hoc fecit_; or whether my matter must be an appendix to my Lord of Essex suit; or whether her Majesty, 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 envy, not thanks. This is a course to quench all good spirits, and to corrupt every man's nature, which will, I fear, much hurt her Majesty's service in the end. I have been like a piece of stuff bespoken in the shop; and if her Majesty will not take me, it may be the selling by parcels will be more gainful. For to be, as I told you, like a child following a bird, 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 gratefully to deserve. And so, not forgetting your business, I leave to trouble you with this idle letter; being but _justa et moderata querimonia_; for indeed I do confess, _primus amor_ will not easily be cast off. And thus again I commend me to you. "

After one more 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 wasagainst him. He would retire "out of the sunshine into the shade. " Onefriend only encouraged him. He did more. He helped him when Bacon mostwanted help, in his straitened and embarrassed "estate. " Essex, when hecould 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 am purposed not to follow the practice of the law_ (_if her Majesty command me in any particular, I shall be ready to do her willing service_); and my reason is only, _because it drinketh too much time, which 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 without 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 philosophy, 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 ofthis letter implied a significant reserve of his devotion. But duringthe brilliant and stormy years of Essex's career which followed, Bacon'srelations to him continued unaltered. Essex pressed Bacon's claimswhenever a chance offered. He did his best to get Bacon a rich wife--theyoung widow of Sir Christopher Hatton--but in vain. Instead of Bacon sheaccepted Coke, and became famous afterwards in the great family quarrel, in which Coke and Bacon again found themselves face to face, and whichnearly ruined Bacon before the time. Bacon worked for Essex when he waswanted, and gave the advice which a shrewd and cautious friend wouldgive to a man who, by his success and increasing pride andself-confidence, was running into serious dangers, arming againsthimself deadly foes, and exposing himself to the chances of fortune. Bacon was nervous about Essex's capacity for war, a capacity whichperhaps was not proved, even by the most brilliant exploit of the time, the capture of Cadiz, in which Essex foreshadowed the heroic butwell-calculated audacities of Nelson and Cochrane, and showed himself aslittle able as they to bear the intoxication of success, and to work inconcert with envious and unfriendly associates. At the end of the year1596, the year in which Essex had won such reputation at Cadiz, Baconwrote him a letter of advice and remonstrance. It is a lively pictureof the defects and dangers of Essex's behaviour as the Queen'sfavourite; and it is a most characteristic and worldly-wise summary ofthe ways which Bacon would have him take, to cure the one and escape theother. Bacon had, as he says, "good reason to think that the Earl'sfortune comprehended his own. " And the letter may perhaps be taken as anindirect warning to Essex that Bacon must, at any rate, take care of hisown fortune, if the Earl persisted in dangerous courses. Bacon shows howhe is to remove the impressions, strong in the Queen's mind, of Essex'sdefects; how he is, by due submissions and stratagems, to catch herhumour--

 "But whether I counsel you the best, or for the best, duty bindeth me to offer to you my wishes. I said to your Lordship last time, _Martha, Martha, attendis ad plurima, 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 theQueen's suspicions, and to neutralize the advantage which his rivalstake of them; how he is to remove "the opinion of his nature being_opiniastre_ and not rulable;" how, avoiding the faults of Leicester andHatton, he is, as far as he can, to "allege them for authors andpatterns. " Especially, he must give up that show of soldier-likedistinction, which the Queen so disliked, and take some quiet post atCourt. He must not alarm the Queen by seeking popularity; he must takecare of his estate; he must get rid of some of his officers; and he mustnot be disquieted by other favourites. 

Bacon wished, as he said afterwards, to see him "with a white staff inhis hand, as my Lord of Leicester had, " an honour and ornament to theCourt in the eyes of the people and foreign ambassadors. But Essex wasnot fit for the part which Bacon urged upon him, that of an obsequiousand vigilant observer of the Queen's moods and humours. As time went on, things became more and more difficult between him and his strangemistress; and there were never wanting men who, like Cecil and Raleigh, for good and bad reasons, feared and hated Essex, and who had the craftand the skill to make the most of his inexcusable errors. At last heallowed himself, from ambition, from the spirit of contradiction, fromthe blind passion for doing what he thought would show defiance to hisenemies, to be tempted into the Irish campaign of 1599. Bacon at a latertime claimed credit for having foreseen and foretold its issue. "I didas plainly see his overthrow, chained as it were by destiny to thatjourney, as it is possible for any man to ground a judgment on futurecontingents. " He warned Essex, so he thought in after years, of thedifficulty of the work; he warned him that he would leave the Queen inthe hands of his enemies: "It would be ill for her, ill for him, ill forthe State. " "I am sure, " he adds, "I never in anything in my life dealtwith him in like earnestness by speech, by writing, and by all the meansI could devise. " But Bacon's memory was mistaken. We have his letters. When Essex went to Ireland, Bacon wrote only in the language of sanguinehope--so little did he see "overthrow chained by destiny to thatjourney, " that "some good spirit led his pen to presage to his Lordshipsuccess;" he saw in the enterprise a great occasion of honour to hisfriend; he gave prudent counsels, but he looked forward confidently toEssex being as "fatal a captain to that war, as Africanus was to the warof Carthage. " Indeed, however anxious he may have been, he could nothave foreseen Essex's unaccountable and to this day unintelligiblefailure. But failure was the end, from whatever cause; failure, disgraceful and complete. Then followed wild and guilty but abortiveprojects for retrieving his failure, by using his power in Ireland tomake himself formidable to his enemies at Court, and even to the Queenherself. He intrigued with Tyrone; he intrigued with James of Scotland;he plunged into a whirl of angry and baseless projects, which came tonothing the moment they were discussed. How empty and idle they were wasshown by his return against orders to tell his own story at Nonsuch, andby thus placing himself alone and undeniably in the wrong, in the powerof the hostile Council. Of course it was not to be thought of that Cecilshould not use his advantage in the game. It was too early, irritatedthough the Queen was, to strike the final blow. But it is impossible notto see, looking back over the miserable history, that Essex was treatedin a way which was certain, sooner or later, to make him, being what hewas, plunge into a fatal and irretrievable mistake. He was treated as acat treats a mouse; he was worried, confined, disgraced, publiclyreprimanded, brought just within verge of the charge of treason, but notquite, just enough to discredit and alarm him, but to leave him still acertain amount of play. He was made to see that the Queen's favour wasnot quite hopeless; but that nothing but the most absolute andunreserved humiliation could recover it. It was plain to any one whoknew Essex that this treatment would drive Essex to madness. "These samegradations of yours"--so Bacon represents himself expostulating with theQueen on her caprices--"are fitter to corrupt than to correct any mindof greatness. " They made Essex desperate; he became frightened for hislife, and he had reason to be so, though not in the way which he feared. At length came the stupid and ridiculous outbreak of the 8th ofFebruary, 1600/1601, a plot to seize the palace and raise the cityagainst the ministers, by the help of a few gentlemen armed only withtheir rapiers. As Bacon himself told the Queen, "if some base andcruel-minded persons had entered into such an action, it might havecaused much blow and combustion; but it appeared well that they weresuch as knew not how to play the malefactors!" But it was sufficient tobring 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 win it; for they, too, were doing whatwould have cost them their heads if Elizabeth had knownit--corresponding, as Essex was accused of doing, with Scotland aboutthe succession, and possibly with Spain. But they were playingcautiously and craftily; he with bungling passion. He had been so longaccustomed to power and place, that he could not endure that rivalsshould keep him out of it. They were content to have their own way, while affecting to be the humblest of servants; he would be nothing lessthan a Mayor of the Palace. He was guilty of a great public crime, asevery man is who appeals to arms for anything short of the most sacredcause. He was bringing into England, which had settled down intopeaceable ways, an imitation of the violent methods of France and theGuises. But the crime as well as the penalty belonged to the age, andcrimes legally said to be against the State mean morally very differentthings, according to the state of society and opinion. It is anunfairness verging on the ridiculous, when the ground is elaboratelylaid for keeping up the impression that Essex was preparing a realtreason against the Queen like that of Norfolk. It was a treason of thesame sort and order as that for which Northumberland sent Somerset tothe block: the treason of being an unsuccessful rival. 

Meanwhile Bacon had been getting gradually into the unofficial employ ofthe Government. He had become one of the "Learned Counsel"--lawyers withsubordinate and intermittent work, used when wanted, but without patentor salary, and not ranking with the regular law officers. The Governmenthad found him useful in affairs of the revenue, in framinginterrogatories for prisoners in the Tower, in drawing up reports ofplots against the Queen. He did not in this way earn enough to supporthimself; but he had thus come to have some degree of access to theQueen, which he represents as being familiar and confidential, though hestill perceived, as he says himself, that she did not like him. At thefirst news of Essex's return to England, Bacon greeted him--

 "MY LORD, --Conceiving that your 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 meritorum_, and therefore it would be hard for me to find you, I have committed to this poor paper the humble salutations of him _that is more yours than any man's, and more yours than any man_. 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_! Which as it is found true in a happy sense, so I wish you do not find another _Quis putasset_ in the manner of taking this so great a service. But I hope it is, as he said, _Nubecula est, cito transibit_, and that your Lordship's wisdom 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. "

But when Essex's conduct in Ireland had to be dealt with, Bacon'sservices were called for; and from this time his relations towards Essexwere altered. Every one, no one better than the Queen herself, knew allthat he owed to Essex. It is strangely illustrative of the time, thatespecially as Bacon held so subordinate a position, he should have beenrequired, and should have been trusted, to act against his only and mostgenerous benefactor. It is strange, too, that however great his loyaltyto the Queen, however much and sincerely he might condemn his friend'sconduct, he should think it possible to accept the task. He says that hemade some remonstrance; and he says, no doubt truly, that during thefirst stage of the business he used the ambiguous position in which hewas placed to soften Essex's inevitable punishment, and to bring about areconciliation between him and the Queen. But he was required, as theQueen's lawyer, to set forth in public Essex's offences; and he admitsthat he did so "not over tenderly. " Yet all this, even if we havemisgivings about it, is intelligible. If he had declined, he could not, perhaps, have done the service which he assures us that he tried to dofor Essex; and it is certain that he would have had to reckon with theterrible lady who in her old age still ruled England from the throne ofHenry VIII. , and who had certainly no great love for Bacon himself. Shehad already shown him in a much smaller matter what was the forfeit tobe paid for any resistance to her will. All the hopes of his life mustperish; all the grudging and suspicious favours which he had won withsuch unremitting toil and patient waiting would be sacrificed, and hewould henceforth live under the wrath of those who never forgave. Andwhatever he did for himself, he believed that he was serving Essex. Hisscheming imagination and his indefatigable pen were at work. He triedstrange indirect methods; he invented a correspondence between hisbrother and Essex, which was to fall into the Queen's hands in order tosoften her wrath and show her Essex's most secret feelings. When theQueen proposed to dine with him at his lodge in Twickenham Park, "thoughI profess not to be a poet, " he "prepared a sonnet tending and alludingto draw on her Majesty's reconcilement to my Lord. " It was an awkwardthing for one who had been so intimate with Essex to be so deep in thecounsels of those who hated him. He complains that many people thoughthim ungrateful and disloyal to his friend, and that stories circulatedto his disadvantage, as if he were poisoning the Queen's ear againstEssex. But he might argue fairly enough that, wilful and wrong-headed asEssex had been, it was the best that he could now do for him; and aslong as it was only a question of Essex's disgrace and enforced absencefrom Court, Bacon could not be bound to give up the prospects of hislife--indeed, his public duty as a subordinate servant of government--onaccount of his friend's inexcusable and dangerous follies. Essex did notsee it so, and in the subjoined correspondence had the advantage; butBacon's position, though a higher one might be imagined, where men hadbeen such friends as these two men had been, is quite a defensible one:

 "MY LORD, --No man can better 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 _bonus civis_, which with us is a good and true servant to the Queen, and next of _bonus vir_, that is an honest man. I desire your Lordship also to think 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 favour, 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 yield 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's 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 persuaded 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, "FR. BACON. "

To this letter Essex returned an answer of dignified reserve, such asBacon 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 directed my sight inward only, to examine myself. You do pray me to believe that you only aspire to the conscience and commendation of _bonus civis_ and _bonus vir_; and I do faithfully assure you, that while that is your ambition (though your course be active and mine contemplative), yet we shall both _convenire in codem tertio_ 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 Sovereign'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 with my fall. And till her Majesty, that knows I was never bird of prey, finds it to agree with her will and her service that my wings should be imped again, I have committed myself to the mire. No power but my God's and 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 for high treason, a trial of which noone could doubt the purpose and end. The examination of accomplicesrevealed speeches, proposals, projects, not very intelligible to us inthe still imperfectly understood game of intrigue that was going onamong all parties at the end of Elizabeth's reign, but quite enough toplace Essex at the mercy of the Government and the offended Queen. "Thenew information, " says Mr. Spedding, "had been immediately communicatedto Coke and Bacon. " Coke, as Attorney-General, of course conducted theprosecution; and the next prominent person on the side of the Crown wasnot the Solicitor, or any other regular law officer, but Bacon, thoughholding the very subordinate place of one of the "Learned Counsel. "

It does not appear that he thought it strange, that he showed any painor reluctance, that he sought to be excused. He took it as a matter ofcourse. The part assigned to Bacon in the prosecution was as importantas that of Coke; and he played it more skilfully and effectively. Trialsin those days were confused affairs, often passing into a mere wranglebetween the judges, lawyers, and lookers-on, and the prisoner at thebar. It was so in this case. Coke is said to have blundered in his wayof presenting the evidence, and to have been led away from the pointinto an altercation with Essex. Probably it really did not much matter;but the trial was getting out of its course and inclining in favour ofthe prisoner, till Bacon--Mr. Spedding thinks, out of his regularturn--stepped forward and retrieved matters. This is Mr. Spedding'saccount of what Bacon said and did:

 "By this time the argument had drifted so far away from the point that it must have been difficult for a listener to remember what it was that the prisoners were charged with, 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 intimation 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 counsel, 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 in opening and enforcing the points thereof, insomuch as I speak not before a country jury 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 private man dare approach the person of his sovereign with a traitorous intent. And therefore they run another side course, _oblique et à latere_: some to reform corruptions of the State and religion; some to reduce the ancient liberties and customs pretended 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 present rulers. And this likewise is the use of those that work mischief 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 councillors from her Majesty's favour, and the fear he stood in of his pretended enemies lest they should murder him in his house. Therefore he saith he was compelled to fly into the City for succour and assistance; not much unlike Pisistratus, of whom it was so anciently written 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. With like pretences of dangers and assaults the Earl of Essex entered the City 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 would have done well. But now _magna scelera terminantur in hæresin_; 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 undutiful 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 anddangers--"I call forth Mr. Bacon against Mr. Bacon, " and referred to theletters which Bacon had written in his name, and in which thesedangerous enmities were taken for granted. Bacon, in answer, repeatedwhat he said so often--"That he had spent more time in vain in studyinghow to make the Earl a good servant to the Queen and State than he haddone in anything else. " Once more Coke got the proceedings into atangle, and once more Bacon came forward to repair the miscarriage ofhis leader. 

 "'I have never yet seen in any case such favour shown to any prisoner; so many digressions, such delivering of evidence by fractions, and so silly a defence of such great and notorious treasons. May it please your Grace, you have seen how weakly he hath shadowed his purpose 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 forgetfulness, 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 with 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 he had purposed anything against others than those his private enemies, he would not have stirred with so slender a company. Whereunto Mr. Bacon answered:

 "'It was not the company you carried with you but the assistance 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 gentlemen, 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 himself into a pilgrim's weeds, and in that disguise to steal away to scape their fury. Even such was my Lord's confidence too, and his pretence 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 he 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 havebeen a special reason for his employment. It is difficult to avoid theconclusion that, on the part of the Government, Bacon was thus used forthe very reason that he had been the friend of Essex. He was notcommonly called upon in such prosecutions. He was not employed by Cecilin the Winchester trials of Raleigh, Grey, and Cobham, three yearsafterwards, nor in those connected with the Gunpowder Plot. He wascalled upon now because no one could so much damage Essex; and this lastproof of his ready service was required by those whose favour, sinceEssex had gone hopelessly wrong, he had been diligently seeking. AndBacon acquiesced in the demand, apparently without surprise. No recordremains to show that he felt any difficulty in playing his part. He hadpersuaded himself that his public duty, his duty as a good citizen tothe Queen and the commonwealth, demanded of him that he should obey thecall to do his best to bring a traitor to punishment. 

Public duty has claims on a man as well as friendship, and in manyconceivable cases claims paramount to those of friendship. And yetfriendship, too, has claims, at least on a man's memory. Essex had beena dear friend, if words could mean anything. He had done more than anyman had done for Bacon, generously and nobly, and Bacon had acknowledgedit in the amplest terms. Only a year before he had written, "I am asmuch yours as any man's, and as much yours as any man. " It is not, andit was not, a question of Essex's guilt. It may be a question whetherthe whole matter was not exaggerated as to its purpose, as it certainlywas as to its real danger and mischief. We at least know that hisrivals dabbled in intrigue and foolish speeches as well as he; thatlittle more than two years afterwards Raleigh and Grey and Cobham werecondemned for treason in much the same fashion as he was; that Cecil tothe end of his days--with whatever purpose--was a pensioner of Spain. The question was not whether Essex was guilty. The question for Baconwas, whether it was becoming in him, having been what he had been toEssex, to take a leading part in proceedings which were to end in hisruin and death. He was not a judge. He was not a regular law officerlike Coke. His only employment had been casual and occasional. He might, most naturally, on the score of his old friendship, have asked to beexcused. Condemning, as he did, his friend's guilt and folly, he mighthave refused to take part in a cause of blood, in which his best friendmust perish. He might honestly have given up Essex as incorrigible, andhave retired to stand apart in sorrow and silence while the inevitabletragedy was played out. The only answer to this is, that to havedeclined would have incurred the Queen's displeasure: he would haveforfeited any chance of advancement; nay, closely connected as he hadbeen with Essex, he might have been involved in his friend's ruin. Butinferior men have marred their fortunes by standing by their friends innot undeserved trouble, and no one knew better than Bacon what wasworthy and noble in human action. The choice lay before him. He seemshardly to have gone through any struggle. He persuaded himself that hecould not help himself, under the constraint of his duty to the Queen, and he did his best to get Essex condemned. 

And this was not all. The death of Essex was a shock to the popularityof Elizabeth greater than anything that had happened in her long reign. Bacon's name also had come into men's mouths as that of a time-serverwho played fast and loose with Essex and his enemies, and who, when hehad got what he could from Essex, turned to see what he could get fromthose who put him to death. A justification of the whole affair was feltto be necessary; and Bacon was fixed upon for the distinction and thedishonour of doing it. No one could tell the story so well, and it wasfelt that he would not shrink from it. Nor did he. In cold blood he satdown to blacken Essex, using his intimate personal knowledge of the pastto strengthen his statements against a friend who was in his grave, andfor whom none could answer but Bacon himself. It is a well-compacted andforcible account of Essex's misdoings, on which of course the colour ofdeliberate and dangerous treason was placed. Much of it, no doubt, wastrue; but even of the facts, and much more of the colour, there was nocheck to be had, and it is certain that it was an object to theGovernment to make out the worst. It is characteristic that Baconrecords that he did not lose sight of the claims of courtesy, andstudiously spoke of "my Lord of Essex" in the draft submitted forcorrection to the Queen; but she was more unceremonious, and insistedthat the "rebel" should be spoken of simply as "Essex. "

After a business of this kind, fines and forfeitures flowed inabundantly, and were "usually bestowed on deserving servants or favouredsuitors by way of reward;" and Bacon came in for his share. Out of oneof the fines he received £1200. "The Queen hath done something for me, "he writes to a friendly creditor, "though not in the proportion I hadhoped, " and he afterwards asked for something more. It was rather underthe value of Essex's gift to him in 1594. But she still refused him allpromotion. He was without an official place in the Queen's service, andhe never was allowed to have it. It is clear that the "Declaration ofthe Treason of the Earl of Essex, " if it justified the Government, didnot remove the odium which had fallen on Bacon. Mr. Spedding says thathe can find no signs of it. The proof of it is found in the "Apology"which Bacon found it expedient to write after Elizabeth's death andearly in James's reign. He found that the recollection of the way inwhich he had dealt with his friend hung heavy upon him; men hesitated totrust him in spite of his now recognised ability. Accordingly, he drewup an apology, which he addressed to Lord Mountjoy, the friend, inreality half the accomplice, of Essex, in his wild, ill-defined plan forputting pressure on Elizabeth. It is a clear, able, of course _ex parte_statement of the doings of the three chief actors, two of whom could nolonger answer for themselves, or correct and contradict the third. Itrepresents the Queen as implacable and cruel, Essex as incorrigibly andoutrageously wilful, proud, and undutiful, Bacon himself as using everyeffort and device to appease the Queen's anger and suspiciousness, andto bring Essex to a wiser and humbler mind. The picture is indeed avivid one, and full of dramatic force, of an unrelenting and mercilessmistress bent on breaking and bowing down to the dust the haughty spiritof a once-loved but rebellious favourite, whom, though he has deeplyoffended, she yet wishes to bring once more under her yoke; and of thecalm, keen-witted looker-on, watching the dangerous game, not withoutpersonal interest, but with undisturbed presence of mind, and doing hisbest to avert an irreparable and fatal breach. How far he honestly didhis best for his misguided friend we can only know from his own report;but there is no reason to think that he did Essex ill service, thoughhe notices in passing an allegation that the Queen in one of her angryfits had charged him with this. But his interest clearly was to make upthe quarrel between the Queen and Essex. Bacon would have been a greaterman with both of them if he had been able to do so. He had been toodeeply in Essex's intimacy to make his new position of mediator, with astrong bias on the Queen's side, quite safe and easy for a man ofhonourable mind; but a cool-judging and prudent man may well have actedas he represents himself acting without forgetting what he owed to hisfriend. Till the last great moment of trial there is a good deal to besaid for Bacon: a man keenly alive to Essex's faults, with a strongsense of what he owed to the Queen and the State, and with his ownreasonable chances of rising greatly prejudiced by Essex's folly. But atlength came the crisis which showed the man, and threw light on all thathad passed before, when he was picked out, out of his regular place, tobe charged with the task of bringing home the capital charge againstEssex. He does not say he hesitated. He does not say that he asked to beexcused the terrible office. He did not flinch as the minister ofvengeance for those who required that Essex should die. He did his work, we are told by his admiring biographer, better than Coke, and repairedthe blunders of the prosecution. He passes over very shortly this partof the business: "It was laid upon me with the rest of my fellows;" yetit is the knot and key of the whole, as far as his own character isconcerned. Bacon had his public duty: his public duty may have compelledhim to stand apart from Essex. But it was his interest, it was no partof his public duty, which required him to accept the task of accuser ofhis friend, and in his friend's direst need calmly to drive home awell-directed stroke that should extinguish chances and hopes, and makehis ruin certain. No one who reads his anxious letters about prefermentand the Queen's favour, about his disappointed hopes, about hisstraitened means and distress for money, about his difficulties with hiscreditors--he was twice arrested for debt--can doubt that the questionwas between his own prospects and his friend; and that to his owninterest he sacrificed his friend and his own honour. 

CHAPTER III. 

BACON AND JAMES I. 

Bacon's life was a double one. There was the life of high thinking, ofdisinterested aims, of genuine enthusiasm, of genuine desire to delightand benefit mankind, by opening new paths to wonder and knowledge andpower. And there was the put on and worldly life, the life of supposednecessities for the provision of daily bread, the life of ambition andself-seeking, which he followed, not without interest and satisfaction, but at bottom because he thought he must--must be a great man, must berich, must live in the favour of the great, because without it his greatdesigns could not be accomplished. His original plan of life wasdisclosed in his letter to Lord Burghley: to get some office with anassured income and not much work, and then to devote the best of histime to his own subjects. But this, if it was really his plan, wasgradually changed: first, because he could not get such a place; andnext because his connection with Essex, the efforts to gain him theAttorney's place, and the use which the Queen made of him after Essexcould do no more for him, drew him more and more into public work, andspecially the career of the law. We know that he would not by preferencehave 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 sothe two lives went on side by side, the worldly one--he would have said, the practical one--often interfering with the life of thought anddiscovery, and partly obscuring it, but yet always leaving it paramountin his own mind. His dearest and most cherished ideas, the thoughts withwhich he was most at home and happiest, his deepest and truestambitions, were those of an enthusiastic and romantic believer in agreat discovery just within his grasp. They were such as the dreams andvisions of his great Franciscan namesake, and of the imaginative seekersafter knowledge in the middle ages, real or mythical, Albert the Great, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus; they were the eager, undoubting hopes ofthe physical students in Italy and England in his own time, GiordanoBruno, Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert, Galileo, or the founders of theItalian prototype of "Solomon's House" in the _New Atlantis_, theprecursor of our Royal Societies, the Academy of the _Lincei_ at Rome. Among these meditations was his inner life. But however he may haveoriginally planned his course, and though at times under the influenceof disappointment he threatened to retire to Cambridge or to travelabroad, he had bound himself fast to public life, and soon ceased tothink of quitting it. And he had a real taste for it--for its shows, itsprizes, for the laws and turns of the game, for its debates andvicissitudes. He was no mere idealist or recluse to undervalue ordespise the real grandeur of the world. He took the keenest interest inthe nature and ways of mankind; he liked to observe, to generalise inshrewd and sometimes cynical epigrams. He liked to apply his powerfuland fertile intellect to the practical problems of society andgovernment, to their curious anomalies, to their paradoxical phenomena;he liked to address himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, tothe principles and entanglements of English law; he aspired, both as alecturer and a legislator, to improve and simplify it. It was not beyondhis hopes to shape a policy, to improve administration, to becomepowerful by bringing his sagacity and largeness of thought to theservice of the State, in reconciling conflicting forces, in mediatingbetween jealous parties and dangerous claims. And he liked to enter intothe humours of a Court; to devote his brilliant imagination andaffluence of invention either to devising a pageant which should throwall others into the shade, or a compromise which should get greatpersons out of some difficulty of temper or pique. 

In all these things he was as industrious, as laborious, as calmlypersevering and tenacious, as he was in his pursuit of his philosophicalspeculations. He was a compound of the most adventurous and mostdiversified ambition, with a placid and patient temper, such as wecommonly associate with moderate desires and the love of retirement andan easy life. To imagine and dare anything, and never to let go theobject of his pursuit, is one side of him; on the other he isobsequiously desirous to please and fearful of giving offence, thehumblest and most grateful and also the most importunate of suitors, ready to bide his time with an even cheerfulness of spirit, which yet itwas not safe to provoke by ill offices and the wish to thwart him. Henever misses a chance of proffering his services; he never lets pass anopportunity of recommending himself to those who could help him. He isso bent on natural knowledge that we have a sense of incongruity when wesee him engaging in politics as if he had no other interest. He throwshimself with such zest into the language of the moralist, thetheologian, the historian, that we forget we have before us the authorof a new departure in physical inquiry, and the unwearied compiler oftables of natural history. When he is a lawyer, he seems only a lawyer. If he had not been the author of the _Instauratio_, his life would nothave looked very different from that of any other of the shrewd andsupple lawyers who hung on to the Tudor and Stuart Courts, and whounscrupulously pushed their way to preferment. He claimed to be, inspite of the misgivings of Elizabeth and her ministers, as devoted topublic work and as capable of it as any of them. He was ready foranything, for any amount of business, ready, as in everything, to takeinfinite trouble about it. The law, if he did not like it, was yet noby-work with him; he was as truly ambitious as the men with whom hemaintained so keen and for long so unsuccessful a rivalry. He feltbitterly the disappointment of seeing men like Coke and Fleming andDoddridge and Hobart pass before him; he could not, if he had been onlya lawyer, have coveted more eagerly the places, refused to him, whichthey got; only, he had besides a whole train of purposes, an inner andsupreme ambition, of which they knew nothing. And with all this there isno apparent consciousness of these manifold and varied interests. Henever affected to conceal from himself his superiority to other men inhis aims and in the grasp of his intelligence. But there is no tracethat he prided himself on the variety and versatility of these powers, or that he even distinctly realized to himself that it was anythingremarkable that he should have so many dissimilar objects and be able soreadily to pursue them in such different directions. 

It is doubtful whether, as long as Elizabeth lived, Bacon could everhave risen above his position among the "Learned Counsel, " an officewithout patent or salary or regular employment. She used, him, and hewas willing to be used; but he plainly did not appear in her eyes to bethe kind of man who would suit her in the more prominent posts of herGovernment. Unusual and original ability is apt, till it is generallyrecognised, to carry with it suspicion and mistrust as to its beingreally all that it seems to be. Perhaps she thought of the possibilityof his flying out unexpectedly at some inconvenient pinch, andattempting to serve her interests, not in her way, but in his own;perhaps she distrusted in business and state affairs so brilliant adiscourser, whose heart was known, first and above all, to be set ongreat dreams of knowledge; perhaps those interviews with her in which hedescribes the counsels which he laid before her, and in which hisshrewdness and foresight are conspicuous, may not have been so welcometo her as he imagined; perhaps, it is not impossible, that he may havebeen too compliant for her capricious taste, and too visibly anxious toplease. Perhaps, too, she could not forget, in spite of what hadhappened, that he had been the friend, and not the very generous friend, of Essex. But, except as to a share of the forfeitures, with which hewas not satisfied, his fortunes did not rise under Elizabeth. 

Whatever may have been the Queen's feelings towards him, there is nodoubt that one powerful influence, which lasted into the reign of James, was steadily adverse to his advancement. Burghley had been strangelyniggardly in what he did to help his brilliant nephew; he was going offthe scene, and probably did not care to trouble himself about a youngerand uncongenial aspirant to service. But his place was taken by his son, Robert Cecil; and Cecil might naturally have been expected to welcomethe co-operation of one of his own family who was foremost among therising men of Cecil's own generation, and who certainly was mostdesirous to do him service. But it is plain that he early made up hismind to keep Bacon in the background. It is easy to imagine reasons, though the apparent short-sightedness of the policy may surprise us; butCecil was too reticent and self-controlled a man to let his reasonsappear, and his words, in answer to his cousin's applications for hisassistance, were always kind, encouraging, and vague. But we must judgeby the event, and that makes it clear that Cecil did not care to seeBacon in high position. Nothing can account for Bacon's strange failurefor so long a time to reach his due place in the public service but thesecret hostility, whatever may have been the cause, of Cecil. 

There was also another difficulty. Coke was the great lawyer of the day, a man whom the Government could not dispense with, and whom it wasdangerous to offend. And Coke thoroughly disliked Bacon. He thoughtlightly of his law, and he despised his refinement and his passion forknowledge. He cannot but have resented the impertinence, as he must havethought it, of Bacon having been for a whole year his rival for office. It is possible that if people then agreed with Mr. Spedding's opinion asto the management of Essex's trial, he may have been irritated byjealousy; but a couple of months after the trial (April 29, 1601) Baconsent to Cecil, with a letter of complaint, the following account of ascene 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 reseizure of the lands of Geo. Moore, a relapsed 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, '_Mr. Bacon, if you have any tooth against me pluck 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 not; and the less you speak of your own greatness, the more I will think of it. _'

 "He replied, '_I think scorn to stand upon terms of greatness towards 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: '_Mr. 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 with 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 disgraceful words besides, which I answered with silence, and showing that I was not moved with them. "

The threat of the _capias ultegatum_ was probably in reference to thearrest of Bacon for debt in September, 1593. After this we are notsurprised at Bacon writing to Coke, "who take to yourself a liberty todisgrace and disable my law, my experience, my discretion, " that, "sinceI missed the Solicitor's place (the rather I think by your means) Icannot expect that you and I shall ever serve as Attorney and Solicitortogether, but either serve with another on your remove, or step intosome other course. " And Coke, no doubt, took care that it should be so. Cecil, too, may possibly have thought that Bacon gave no proof of hisfitness for affairs in thus bringing before him a squabble in which bothparties lost their tempers. 

Bacon was not behind the rest of the world in "the posting of men ofgood quality towards the King, " in the rash which followed the Queen'sdeath, of those who were eager to proffer their services to James, forwhose peaceful accession Cecil had so skilfully prepared the way. Hewrote to every one who, he thought, could help him: to Cecil, and toCecil's man--"I pray you, as you find time let him know that he is thepersonage in the State which I love most;" to Northumberland, "If I maybe of any use to your Lordship, by my head, tongue, pen, means, orfriends, I humbly pray you to hold me your own;" to the King's Scotchfriends and servants, even to Southampton, the friend of Essex, who hadbeen shut up in the Tower since his condemnation with Essex, and who wasnow released. "This great change, " Bacon assured him, "hath wrought inme no other change towards your Lordship than this, that I may safely benow that which I truly was before. " Bacon found in after years thatSouthampton was not so easily conciliated. But at present Bacon washopeful: "In mine own particular, " he writes, "I have many comforts andassurances; but in mine own opinion the chief is, that the _canvassingworld is gone, and the deserving world is come_. " He asks to berecommended to the King--"I commend myself to your love and to thewell-using of my name, as well in repressing and answering for me, ifthere be any biting or nibbling at it in that place, as in impressing agood conceit and opinion of me, chiefly in the King, as otherwise inthat 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. Butthough he obtained an interview with the King, James's arrival inEngland brought no immediate prospect of improvement in Bacon'sfortunes. Indeed, his name was at first inadvertently passed over in thelist of Queen's servants who were to retain their places. The firstthing we hear of is his arrest a second time for debt; and his lettersof thanks to Cecil, who had rendered him assistance, are written in deepdepression. 

 "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 convenient advancement. For as for any ambition, I do assure your Honour, mine is quenched. In the Queen's, my excellent Mistress's, time the _quorum_ was small: her service was a kind of freehold, and it was a more solemn time. All those points agreed with my nature and judgment. My ambition now I shall only put upon my pen, whereby I shall be able to maintain memory and merit of the times succeeding. 

 "Lastly, for this divulged and almost prostituted title of knighthood, 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 repaidby the day; and Bacon only makes a humble request, which, it might besupposed, could have been easily granted. 

 "IT MAY PLEASE YOUR GOOD LORDSHIP, --In answer of your last letter, your money shall be ready before your day: principal, 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 memor ipse mei_; and if there have been _aliquid nimis_, it shall be amended. And, to be plain with your Lordship, that will quicken me now which 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 will 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 will not; I mean, that I might not be merely gregarious in a troop. The coronation is at hand. It may please your Lordship to let me hear from you speedily. So I continue your Lordship's ever much bounden, "FR. BACON. "From Gorhambury, this 16th of July, 1603. "

But it was not done. He "obtained his title, but not in a manner todistinguish him. He was knighted at Whitehall two days before thecoronation, but had to share the honour with 300 others. "

It was not quite true that his "ambition was quenched. " For the rest ofCecil's life Cecil was the first man at James's Court; and to the lastthere was one thing that Bacon would not appear to believe--he did notchoose to believe that it was Cecil who kept him back from employmentand honour. To the last he persisted in assuming that Cecil was theperson who would help, if he could, a kinsman devoted to his interestsand profoundly conscious of his worth. To the last he commended hiscause to Cecil in terms of unstinted affection and confiding hope. It isdifficult to judge of the sincerity of such language. The mere customarylanguage of compliment employed by every one at this time was of a kindwhich to us sounds intolerable. It seems as if nothing that ingenuitycould devise was too extravagant for an honest man to use, and for a manwho respected himself to accept. It must not, indeed, be forgotten thatconventionalities, as well as insincerity, differ in their forms indifferent times; and that insincerity may lurk behind frank and clearwords, when they are the fashion, as much as in what is like merefulsome adulation. But words mean something, in spite of forms andfashions. When a man of great genius writes his private letters, we wishgenerally to believe on the whole what he says; and there are no limitsto the esteem, the honour, the confidence, which Bacon continued to theend to express towards Cecil. Bacon appeared to trust him--appeared, inspite of continued disappointments, to rely on his good-will and goodoffices. But for one reason or another Bacon still remained in theshade. He was left to employ his time as he would, and to work his wayby himself. 

He was not idle. He prepared papers which he meant should come beforethe King, on the pressing subjects of the day. The Hampton Courtconference between the Bishops and the Puritan leaders was at hand, andhe drew up a moderating paper on the _Pacification of the Church_. Thefeeling against him for his conduct towards Essex had not died away, andhe addressed to Lord Mountjoy that _Apology concerning the Earl ofEssex_, so full of interest, so skilfully and forcibly written, so vivida picture of the Queen's ways with her servants, which has every meritexcept that of clearing Bacon from the charge of disloyalty to his bestfriend. The various questions arising out of the relations of the twokingdoms, now united under James, were presenting themselves. They werenot of easy solution, and great mischief would follow if they weresolved wrongly. Bacon turned his attention to them. He addressed adiscourse to the King on the union of the two kingdoms, the first of aseries of discussions on the subject which Bacon made peculiarly hisown, and which, no doubt, first drew the King's attention and favour tohim. 

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 thoughtand hope of his life. This time of neglect gave him the opportunity ofleisurely calling together and examining the ideas which had long hadhold of his mind about the state of human knowledge, about thepossibilities of extending it, about the hopes and powers which that newknowledge opened, and about the methods of realising this greatprospect. This, the passion of his life, never asleep even in thehottest days of business or the most hopeless days of defeat, must havehad full play during these days of suspended public employment. He was aman who was not easily satisfied with his attempts to arrange the orderand proportions of his plans for mastering that new world of unknowntruth, which he held to be within the grasp of man if he would only dareto seize it; and he was much given to vary the shape of his work, and totry experiments in composition and even style. He wrote and rewrote. Besides what was finally published, there remains a larger quantity ofwork which never reached the stage of publication. He repeated over andover again the same thoughts, the same images and characteristicsayings. Among these papers is one which sums up his convictions aboutthe work before him, and the vocation to which he had been called inrespect 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 authenticstatement of what he looked upon as his special business in life. It isthis mission which he states to himself in the following paper. It isdrawn up in "stately Latin. " Mr. Spedding's translation is no unworthyrepresentation 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 by nature to perform. 

 "Now among all the benefits that could be conferred upon mankind, I found none so great as the discovery of new arts, endowments, and commodities for the bettering of man's life. .. . But if a man could succeed, not in striking out some particular invention, however useful, but in kindling a light in nature--a light that should in its very rising touch and 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 being gifted by nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order; and as being a man that neither affects what is new nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind of imposture. 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) that if I came to hold office in the State, I might get something done too for the good of men's souls. When I found, however, that my zeal was mistaken for ambition, and my life had already readied the turning-point, and my breaking 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 others, I was by no means discharging the duty that lay upon me--I put all those thoughts aside, and (in pursuance of my old determination) betook myself wholly to this work. Nor am I discouraged from it because I see signs in the times of the decline and overthrow of that knowledge 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 artifices and devices which 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 impediments as these. Far otherwise is it with that knowledge whose dignity is maintained by works of utility and power. For the injuries, therefore, which should proceed from the times, 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 contemplations nothing is to be respected but Truth. If any one call on me for _works_, and 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 premises and forecasts 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 _wish_. Lastly--though this is a matter of less moment--if any of our politicians, who used to make their calculations and conjectures 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 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 undertaking 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 with it Bacon returned to anindustrious public life, which was not to be interrupted till it finallycame to an end with his strange and irretrievable fall. The opportunityhad come; and Bacon, patient, vigilant, and conscious of great powersand 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 inshowing that he meant to make himself felt. The House of Commons had nosooner met than it was involved in a contest with the Chancery, with theLords, and finally with the King himself, about its privileges--in thiscase its exclusive right to judge of the returns of its members. Bacon'stime was come for showing the King both that he was willing to do himservice, and that he was worth being employed. He took a leading part inthe discussions, and was trusted by the House as their spokesman andreporter in the various conferences. The King, in his overweeningconfidence in his absolute prerogative, had, indeed, got himself intoserious difficulty; for the privilege was one which it was impossiblefor the Commons to give up. But Bacon led the House to agree to anarrangement which saved their rights; and under a cloud of words ofextravagant flattery he put the King in good-humour, and elicited fromhim the spontaneous proposal of a compromise which ended a verydangerous dispute. "The King's voice, " said Bacon, in his report to theHouse, "was the voice of God in man, the good spirit of God in the mouthof man; I do not say the voice of God and not of man; I am not one ofHerod's flatterers; a curse fell upon him that said it, a curse on himthat suffered it. We might say, as was said to Solomon, We are glad, OKing, 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. Thesession was not so stormy as some of the later ones; but occasions arosewhich revealed to the King and to the House of Commons the deeplydiscordant assumptions and purposes by which each party was influenced, and which brought out Bacon's powers of adjusting difficulties andharmonising claims. He never wavered in his loyalty to his own House, where it is clear that his authority was great. But there was no limitto 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 itcould be safely done. Dealing with the Commons, his policy was "to becontent with the substance and not to stand on the form. " Dealing withthe King, he was forward to recognise all that James wanted recognisedof his kingcraft and his absolute sovereignty. Bacon assailed with aforce and keenness which showed what he could do as an opponent, theamazing and intolerable grievances arising out of the survival of suchfeudal customs as Wardship and Purveyance; customs which made over aman's eldest son and property, during a minority, to the keeping of theKing, that is, to a King's favourite, and allowed the King's servants tocut down a man's timber before the windows of his house. But he urgedthat these grievances should be taken away with the utmost tendernessfor the King's honour and the King's purse. In the great and troublesomequestions relating to the Union he took care to be fully prepared. Hewas equally strong on points of certain and substantial importance, equally quick to suggest accommodations where nothing substantial wastouched. His attitude was one of friendly and respectful independence. It was not misunderstood by the King. Bacon, who had hitherto been anunsworn and unpaid member of the Learned Counsel, now received hisoffice by patent, with a small salary, and he was charged with the gravebusiness of preparing the work for the Commissioners for the Union ofthe Kingdoms, in which, when the Commission met, he took a foremost andsuccessful part. 

But the Parliament before which their report was to be laid did not meettill ten months after the work of the Commission was done (Dec. , 1604--Nov. , 1605). For nearly another year Bacon had no public work. Theleisure was used for his own objects. He was interested in history in adegree only second to his interest in nature; indeed, but for theengrossing claims of his philosophy of nature, he might have been thefirst and one of the greatest of our historians. He addressed a letterto the Chancellor Ellesmere on the deficiencies of British history, andon the opportunities which offered for supplying them. He himself couldat present do nothing; "but because there be so many good painters, bothfor hand and colours, it needeth but encouragement and instructions togive life and light unto it. " But he mistook, in this as in otherinstances, the way in which such things are done. Men do not accomplishsuch things to order, but because their souls compel them, as he himselfwas building up his great philosophical structure, in the midst of hisambition and disappointment. And this interval of quiet enabled him tobring out his first public appeal on the subject which most filled hismind. He completed in English the _Two Books of the Advancement ofKnowledge_, which were published at a book-shop at the gateway of Gray'sInn in Holborn (Oct. , 1605). He intended that it should be published inLatin also; but he was dissatisfied with the ornate translation sent himfrom Cambridge, and probably he was in a hurry to get the book out. Itwas dedicated to the King, not merely by way of compliment, but with theserious hope that his interest might be awakened in the subjects whichwere nearest Bacon's heart. Like other of Bacon's hopes, it wasdisappointed. The King's studies and the King's humours were not of thekind to make him care for Bacon's visions of the future, or his eagerdesire to begin at once a novel method of investigating the facts andlaws of nature; and the appeal to him fell dead. Bacon sent the bookabout to his friends with explanatory letters. To Sir T. Bodley hewrites:

 "I think no man may more truly say with the Psalm, _Multum incola fuit anima mea_ [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, for which I was not very fit by nature, and more unfit by the preoccupation of my mind. Therefore, calling myself home, I have now enjoyed myself; whereof likewise I desire to make the world partaker. "

To Lord Salisbury, in a note of elaborate compliment, he describes hispurpose by an image which he repeats more than once. "I shall contentmyself to awake better spirits, _like a bell-ringer, which is first upto call others to church_. " But the two friends whose judgment hechiefly valued, and who, as on other occasions, were taken into his mostintimate literary confidence, were Bishop Andrewes, his "inquisitor, "and Toby Matthews, a son of the Archbishop of York, who had become aRoman Catholic, and lived in Italy, seeing a good deal of learned menthere, apparently the most trusted of all Bacon's friends. 

When Parliament met again in November, 1605, the Gunpowder Plot and itsconsequences filled all minds. Bacon was not employed about it byGovernment, and his work in the House was confined to carrying onmatters left unfinished from the previous session. On the rumour oflegal promotions and vacancies Bacon once more applied to Salisbury forthe 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 beenin his thoughts: he married; not the lady whom Essex had tried to winfor him, that Lady Hatton who became the wife of his rival Coke, but onewhom Salisbury helped him to gain, an alderman's daughter, AliceBarnham, "an handsome maiden, " with some money and a disagreeablemother, by her second marriage, Lady Packington. Bacon's curious love ofpomp amused the gossips of the day. "Sir Francis Bacon, " writes Carletonto Chamberlain, "was married yesterday to his young wench, in MariboneChapel. He was clad from top to toe in purple, and hath made himself andhis wife such store of raiments of cloth of silver and gold that itdraws deep into her portion. " Of his married life we hear next tonothing: in his _Essay on Marriage_ he is not enthusiastic in itspraise; almost the only thing we know is that in his will, twenty yearsafterwards, he showed his dissatisfaction with his wife, who after hisdeath married again. But it gave him an additional reason, and anadditional plea, for pressing for preferment, and in the summer of 1606the 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 theSolicitor Doddridge might be otherwise provided for, and he himselfbecome Solicitor. Hopeful as he was, and patient of disappointments, andof what other men would have thought injustice and faithlessness, hefelt keenly both the disgrace and the inconvenience of so oftenexpecting place, and being so often passed over. While the question waspending, he wrote to the King, the Chancellor, and Salisbury. His letterto the King is a record in his own words of his public services. To theChancellor, whom he believed to be his supporter, he represented thediscredit which he suffered--he was a common gaze and a speech;" "thelittle reputation which by his industry he gathered, being scattered andtaken away by continual disgraces, _every new man coming above me_;" andhis wife and his wife's friends were making him feel it. The lettersshow what Bacon thought to be his claims, and how hard he found it toget them recognised. To the Chancellor he urged, among other things, that time was slipping by--

 "I humbly pray 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 was 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 Salisbury forward and affectionate. "

To Salisbury he writes:

 "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 spem dedisti_; for I am sure it was not possible for any living man to have received from another more significant and comfortable 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 careful 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 _vergentibus annis_. And although I know your fortune 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 becontent with another promise. Considering the ability which he had shownin Parliament, the wisdom and zeal with which he had supported theGovernment, and the important position which he held in the House ofCommons, the neglect of him is unintelligible, except on twosuppositions: that the Government, that is Cecil, were afraid ofanything but the mere routine of law, as represented by such men asHobart and Doddridge; or that Coke's hostility to him was unabated, andCoke still too important to be offended. 

Bacon returned to work when the Parliament met, November, 1606. Thequestions arising out of the Union, the question of naturalisation, itsgrounds and limits, the position of Scotchmen born _before_ or _since_the King's accession, the _Antenati_ and _Postnati_, the question of aunion of laws, with its consequences, were discussed with great keennessand much jealous feeling. On the question of naturalisation Bacon tookthe liberal and larger view. The immediate union of laws he opposed aspremature. He was a willing servant of the House, and the House readilymade use of him. He reported the result of conferences, even when hisown opinion was adverse to that of the House. And he reported thespeeches of such persons as Lord Salisbury, probably throwing into themboth form and matter of his own. At length, "silently, on the 25th ofJune, " 1607, he was appointed Solicitor-General. He was thenforty-seven. 

"It was also probably about this time, " writes Mr. Spedding, "that Baconfinally settled the plan of his '_Great Instauration_, ' and began tocall it by that name. "

CHAPTER IV. 

BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL. 

The great thinker and idealist, the great seer of a world of knowledgeto which the men of his own generation were blind, and which they couldnot, even with his help, imagine a possible one, had now won the firststep in that long and toilsome ascent to success in life, in which forfourteen years he had been baffled. He had made himself, for good andfor evil, a servant of the Government of James I. He was prepared todischarge with zeal and care all his duties. He was prepared to performall the services which that Government might claim from its servants. Hehad sought, he had passionately pressed to be admitted within thatcircle in which the will of the King was the supreme law; after that, itwould have been ruin to have withdrawn or resisted. But it does notappear that the thought or wish to resist or withdraw ever presenteditself; he had thoroughly convinced himself that in doing what the Kingrequired he was doing the part of a good citizen, and a faithful servantof the State and Commonwealth. The two lives, the two currents ofpurpose and effort, were still there. Behind all the wrangle of thecourts and the devising of questionable legal subtleties to support someunconstitutional encroachment, or to outflank the defence of someobnoxious prisoner, the high philosophical meditations still went on;the remembrance of their sweetness and grandeur wrung more than oncefrom the jaded lawyer or the baffled counsellor the complaint, in wordswhich had a great charm for him, _Multum incola fuit anima mea_--"Mysoul hath long dwelt" where it would not be. But opinion and ambitionand the immense convenience of being great and rich and powerful, andthe supposed necessities of his condition, were too strong even for hislongings to be the interpreter and the servant of nature. There is notrace of the faintest reluctance on his part to be the willing ministerof a court of which not only the principal figure, but the arbiter andgoverning spirit, was to be George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. 

The first leisure that Bacon had after he was appointed Solicitor heused in a characteristic way. He sat down to make a minute stock-takingof his position and its circumstances. In the summer of 1608 he devoteda week of July to this survey of his life, its objects and itsappliances; and he jotted down, day by day, through the week, from hispresent reflections, or he transcribed from former note-books, a seriesof notes in loose order, mostly very rough and not always intelligible, about everything that could now concern him. This curious and intimaterecord, which he called _Commentarius Solutus_, was discovered by Mr. Spedding, who not unnaturally had some misgivings about publishing sosecret and so ambiguous a record of a man's most private confidenceswith himself. But there it was, and, as it was known, he no doubtdecided wisely in publishing it as it stands; he has done his best tomake it intelligible, and he has also done his best to remove anyunfavourable impressions that might arise from it. It is singularlyinteresting as an evidence of Bacon's way of working, of hiswatchfulness, his industry, his care in preparing himself longbeforehand for possible occasions, his readiness to take any amount oftrouble about his present duties, his self-reliant desire for moreimportant and difficult ones. It exhibits his habit of self-observationand self-correction, his care to mend his natural defects of voice, manner, and delivery; it is even more curious in showing him watchinghis own physical constitution and health, in the most minute details ofsymptoms and remedies, equally with a scientific and a practical object. It contains his estimate of his income, his expenditure, his debts, schedules of lands and jewels, his rules for the economy of his estate, his plans for his new gardens and terraces and ponds and buildings atGorhambury. He was now a rich man, valuing his property at £24, 155 andhis income at £4975, burdened with a considerable debt, but not morethan he might easily look to wipe out. But, besides all these points, there appear the two large interests of his life--the reform ofphilosophy, and his ideal of a great national policy. The "greatness ofBritain" was one of his favourite subjects of meditation. He puts downin his notes the outline of what should be aimed at to secure andincrease it; it is to make the various forces of the great and growingempire work together in harmonious order, without waste, withoutjealousy, without encroachment and collision; to unite not only theinterests but the sympathies and aims of the Crown with those of thepeople and Parliament; and so to make Britain, now in peril from nothingbut from the strength of its own discordant elements, that "Monarchy ofthe West" in reality, which Spain was in show, and, as Bacon alwaysmaintained, only in show. The survey of the condition of hisphilosophical enterprise takes more space. He notes the stages andpoints to which his plans have reached; he indicates, with a favouritequotation or apophthegm--"_Plus ultra_"--"_ausus vanacontemnere_"--"_aditus non nisi sub persona infantis_" soon to befamiliar to the world in his published writings--the lines of argument, sometimes alternative ones, which were before him; he draws out schemesof inquiry, specimen tables, distinctions and classifications about thesubject of Motion, in English interlarded with Latin, or in Latininterlarded with English, of his characteristic and practical sort; henotes the various sources from which he might look for help andco-operation--"of learned men beyond the seas"--"to begin first inFrance to print it"--"laying for a place to command wits and pens;" hehas his eye on rich and childless bishops, on the enforced idleness ofState prisoners in the Tower, like Northumberland and Raleigh, on thegreat schools and universities, where he might perhaps get hold of somecollege for "Inventors"--as we should say, for the endowment ofresearch. These matters fill up a large space of his notes. But histhoughts were also busy about his own advancement. And to these sheetsof miscellaneous memoranda Bacon confided not only his occupations andhis philosophical and political ideas, but, with a curious innocentunreserve, the arts and methods which he proposed to use in order to winthe favour of the great and to pull down the reputation of his rivals. He puts down in detail how he is to recommend himself to the King andthe King's favourites--

 "To set on foot and maintain access with 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 his 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 Salisbury, especially 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 muchbetter. At any rate, one of the points to which he recurs frequently inhis notes is to exhort himself to make his own service a continualcontrast to the Attorney's--"to have in mind and use the Attorney'sweakness, " enumerating a list of instances: "Too full of cases anddistinctions. Nibbling solemnly, he distinguisheth but apprehends not;""No gift with his pen in proclamations and the like;" and at last hedraws out in a series of epigrams his view of "Hubbard'sdisadvantages"--

 "Better at shift than at drift. .. . _Subtilitas sine acrimonia_. .. . No power with the judge. .. . He will alter a thing but not mend. .. . He puts into patents and deeds words not of law but of common sense and discourse. .. . Sociable save in profit. .. . He doth depopulate mine office; otherwise called inclose. .. . I never knew any one of so good a speech with a worse pen. " . .. 

Then in a marginal note--"Solemn goose. Stately, leastwise nodd (?)crafty. They have made him believe that he is wondrous wise. " And, finally, he draws up a paper of counsels and rules for his ownconduct--"_Custumæ aptæ ad Individuum_"--which might supply an outlinefor an essay on the arts of behaviour proper for a rising official, asequel to the biting irony of the essays on _Cunning_ and _Wisdom for aMan'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 prepare 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 sometimes to move out of a memorial shewed and seen. To have particular occasions, fit and graceful and continual, to maintain private speech with every the great persons, and sometimes drawing more than one together. _Ex imitatione Att. _ 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 sometimes 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 payt. (?) 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 attended to. )

These arts of a court were not new; it was not new for men to observethem in their neighbours and rivals. What was new was the writing themdown, with deliberate candour, among a man's private memoranda, asthings to be done and with the intention of practising them. This ofitself, it has been suggested, shows that they were unfamiliar anduncongenial to Bacon; for a man reminds himself of what he is apt toforget. But a man reminds himself also of what seems to him, at themoment, most important, and what he lays most stress upon. And it isclear that these are the rules, rhetorical and ethical, which Bacon laiddown for himself in pursuing the second great object of his life--hisofficial advancement; and that, whatever we think of them, they were themeans which he deliberately approved. 

As long as Salisbury lived, the distrust which had kept Bacon so long inthe shade kept him at a distance from the King's ear, and from influenceon his counsels. Salisbury was the one Englishman in whom the King hadbecome accustomed to confide, in his own conscious strangeness toEnglish ways and real dislike and suspicion of them; Salisbury had anauthority which no one else had, both from his relations with James atthe end of Elizabeth's reign, and as the representative of her policyand the depositary of its traditions; and if he had lived, things mightnot, perhaps, have been better in James's government, but many things, probably, would have been different. But while Salisbury was supreme, Bacon, though very alert and zealous, was mainly busied with hisofficial work; and the Solicitor's place had become, as he says, a "meanthing" compared with the Attorney's, and also an extremely laboriousplace--"one of the painfullest places in the kingdom. " Much of it wasroutine, but responsible and fatiguing routine. But if he was not inSalisbury's confidence, he was prominent in the House of Commons. Thegreat and pressing subject of the time was the increasing difficultiesof the revenue, created partly by the inevitable changes of a growingstate, but much more by the King's incorrigible wastefulness. It wasimpossible to realise completely the great dream and longing of theStuart kings and their ministers to make the Crown independent ofparliamentary supplies; but to dispense with these supplies as much aspossible, and to make as much as possible of the revenue permanent, wasthe continued and fatal policy of the Court. The "Great Contract"--ascheme by which, in return for the surrender by the Crown of certainburdensome and dangerous claims of the Prerogative, the Commons were toassure a large compensating yearly income to the Crown--was Salisbury'sfavourite device during the last two years of his life. It was not aprosperous one. The bargain was an ill-imagined and not very decoroustransaction between the King and his people. Both parties were naturallyjealous of one another, suspicious of underhand dealing and tacitchanges of terms, prompt to resent and take offence, and not easy topacify when they thought advantage had been taken; and Salisbury, eitherby his own fault, or by yielding to the King's canny shiftiness, gavethe business a more haggling and huckstering look than it need have had. Bacon, a subordinate of the Government, but a very important person inthe Commons, did his part, loyally, as it seems, and skilfully insmoothing differences and keeping awkward questions from making theirappearance. Thus he tried to stave off the risk of bringing definitelyto a point the King's cherished claim to levy "impositions, " or customduties, on merchandise, by virtue of his prerogative--a claim which hewarned the Commons not to dispute, and which Bacon, maintaining it aslegal in theory, did his best to prevent them from discussing, and topersuade them to be content with restraining. Whatever he thought of the"Great Contract, " he did what was expected of him in trying to gain forit fair play. But he made time for other things also. He advised, andadvised soundly, on the plantation and finance of Ireland. It was asubject in which he took deep interest. A few years later, with onlytoo sure a foresight, he gave the warning, "lest Ireland civil becomemore dangerous to us than Ireland savage. " He advised--not soundly inpoint of law, but curiously in accordance with modern notions--aboutendowments; though, in this instance, in the famous will case of ThomasSutton, the founder of the Charter House, his argument probably coveredthe scheme of a monstrous job in favour of the needy Court. And his ownwork went on in spite of the pressure of the Solicitor's place. To thefirst years of his official life belong three very interestingfragments, intended to find a provisional place in the plan of the"Great Instauration. " To his friend Toby Matthews, at Florence, he sentin manuscript the great attack on the old teachers of knowledge, whichis perhaps the most brilliant, and also the most insolently unjust andunthinking piece of rhetoric ever composed by him--the _RedargutioPhilosophiarum_. 

 "I send you at this time the only part which hath any harshness; and yet I framed to myself an opinion, that whosoever allowed well of that preface which 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 rightness of the way. And to speak truth, it is to the other but as _palma_ to _pugnus_, part of the same thing more large. .. . Myself 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 conclude with my perpetual wish towards yourself, that the approbation 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 _Visaet Cogitata_--what Francis Bacon had seen of nature and knowledge, andwhat he had come by meditation to think of what he had seen. The letteris not less interesting than the last, in respect to the writer'spurposes, his manner of writing, and his relations to his correspondent. 

 "MY VERY GOOD LORD, --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 refresh 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 I think with all men in my case, if I bind myself to an argument, it loadeth my mind; but if I rid my mind of the present cogitation, it is rather a recreation. 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 Westminster, my request 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 goodness. "

There was yet another production of this time, of which we have anotice from himself in a letter to Toby Matthews, the curious andingenious little treatise on the _Wisdom of the Ancients_, "one of themost popular of his works, " says Mr. Spedding, "in his own and in thenext generation, " but of value to us mainly for its quaint poeticalcolour, and the unexpected turns, like answers to a riddle, given to theancient fables. When this work was published, it was the third time thathe had appeared as an author in print. He thus writes about it andhimself:

 "MR. MATTHEWS, --I do heartily thank you for your letter of the 24th of August from Salamanca; and in recompense thereof I 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 greatest inquisitor in Spain will allow it. .. . My great work goeth forward, and, after my manner, I alter ever when I add. So that nothing is finished till all be finished. 

 "From Gray's Inn, the 17th of February, 1610. "

In the autumn of 1611 the Attorney-General was ill, and Bacon remindedboth the King and Salisbury of his claim. He was afraid, he writes tothe King, with an odd forgetfulness of the persistency and earnestnessof his applications, "that _by reason of my slowness to sue_, andapprehend occasions upon the sudden, keeping one plain course of painfulservice, I may _in fine dierum_ be in danger to be neglected andforgotten. " The Attorney recovered, but Bacon, on New Year's Tide of1611/12, wrote to Salisbury to thank him for his good-will. It is thelast letter of Bacon's to Salisbury which has come down to us. 

 "IT MAY PLEASE YOUR GOOD LORDSHIP, --I would entreat the new year to answer for the old, in my humble thanks to your Lordship, both for many your favours, and chiefly that upon the occasion of Mr. Attorney's infirmity I found your Lordship even as I would wish. This doth increase a desire in me to express my thankful mind to your Lordship; hoping that though I find age and decays grow upon me, yet I may have a flash or two of spirit left to do you service. And I do protest before God, without compliment 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 following May (May 24, 1612) Salisbury died. From this date Jamespassed from government by a minister, who, whatever may have been hisfaults, was laborious, public-spirited, and a statesman, into his ownkeeping and into the hands of favourites, who cared only 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, whichCecil's power had been to him. The field was open for new men and newways; the fashions and ideas of the time had altered during the last tenyears, and those of the Queen's days had gone out of date. Would the newturn out for the better or the worse? Bacon, at any rate, saw thesignificance 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 theGovernment, apparently without such suggestions seeming more intrusiveor officious than a leading article seems now, and perhaps with much thesame effect. It was now a time to do so, if ever; and he was in anofficial relation to the King which entitled him to proffer advice. Heat once prepared to lay his thoughts before the King, and to suggestthat he could do far better service than Cecil, and was ready to takehis place. The policy of the "Great Contract" had certainly brokendown, and the King, under Cecil's guidance, had certainly not known howto manage an English parliament. In writing to the King he found it hardto satisfy himself. Several draft letters remain, and it is not certainwhich of them, if any, was sent. But immediately on Salisbury's death hebegan, May 29th, a letter in which he said that he had never yet beenable to show his affection to the King, "having been as a hawk tied toanother's fist;" and if, "as was said to one that spake great words, _Amice, verba tua desiderant civitatem_, your Majesty say to me, _Bacon, your words require a place to speak them_, " yet that "place or notplace" was with the King. But the draft breaks off abruptly, and withthe date of the 31st we have the following:

 "Your Majesty hath lost a great subject and a great servant. But if I should praise him in propriety, I should say that he was a fit man to keep things from growing worse, but no very 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 business still under 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 Majesty shall give a frame and constitution to matters, before you place the persons, in my simple opinion it were not amiss. But the great matter and most instant for the present, is the consideration of a Parliament, for two effects: the one for the supply of your 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 peremptory 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 Parliament. "

Whether he sent this or not, he prepared another draft. What hadhappened in the mean while we know not, but Bacon was in a bitter mood, and the letter reveals, for the first time, what was really in Bacon'sheart about the "great subject and great servant, " of whom he had justwritten so respectfully, and with whom he had been so closely connectedfor most of his life. The fierceness which had been gathering for yearsof neglect and hindrance under that placid and patient exterior brokeout. He offered himself as Cecil's successor in business of State. Hegave his reason for being hopeful of success. Cecil's bitterest enemycould 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 Majesty this most humble oblation of myself. I may truly say with the psalm, _Multum incola fuit anima mea_, 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 may have seen of myself, though not to make any true judgement by, because I have hitherto had only _potestatem verborum_, 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 advancement), and in a course less exposed to the blasts of fortune, _yet now that he is gone, quo vivente virtutibus certissimum exitium_, I will be ready as a chessman to be wherever your Majesty's royal hand shall set me. Your Majesty will bear me witness, I have not suddenly 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 quam alii mores_. I know mine own heart, and I know not whether God that hath touched my heart with the 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 true way ofretrieving the disorders of the King's finances, full of large and wisecounsel, after advising the King not to be impatient, and assuring himthat a state of debt is not so intolerable--"for it is no new thing forthe greatest Kings to be in debt, " and all the great men of the Courthad been in debt without any "manner of diminution of theirgreatness"--he returns to the charge in detail against Salisbury and theGreat Contract. 

 "My second prayer is, that your Majesty--in respect to the hasty freeing of your state--would not descend to any means, or degree of means, which carrieth not a symmetry with your Majesty and greatness. _He is gone from whom those courses did wholly flow. _ 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 assurance, and with such entreaty (?) as if it should save the bark of your fortune; To contract still where mought be had the readiest payment, 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 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 consideration struck out, was the following. It is no wonder that he struck it out, but it showswhat 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 your zeal to deliver the majesty of God from the vain and indign comprehensions of heresy and degenerate philosophy, as you had by your pen formerly endeavoured to deliver kings from the usurpation of Rome, _perculsit illico animum_ that God would set shortly upon you some visible favour, _and let me not live if I thought not of the taking away of that man_. "

And from this time onwards he scarcely ever mentions Cecil's name in hiscorrespondence with James but with words of condemnation, which implythat Cecil's mischievous policy was the result of private ends. Yet thiswas the man to whom he had written the "New Year's Tide" letter sixmonths before; a letter which is but an echo to the last of all that hehad been accustomed to write to Cecil when asking assistance or offeringcongratulation. Cecil had, indeed, little claim on Bacon's gratitude; hehad spoken him fair in public, and no doubt in secret distrusted andthwarted him. But to the last Bacon did not choose to acknowledge this. Had James disclosed something of his dead servant, who left some strangesecrets behind him, which showed his unsuspected hostility to Bacon?Except on this supposition (but there is nothing to support it), noexaggeration of the liberty allowed to the language of compliment isenough to clear Bacon of an insincerity which is almost inconceivable inany but the meanest tools of power. 

"I assure myself, " wrote Bacon to the King, "your Majesty taketh not mefor one of a busy nature; for my estate being free from alldifficulties, and I having such a large field for contemplation, as Ihave partly and shall much more make manifest unto your Majesty and theworld, to occupy my thoughts, nothing could make me active but love andaffection. " So Bacon described his position with questionableaccuracy--for his estate was not "free from difficulties"--in the newtime coming. He was still kept out of the inner circle of the Council;but from the moment of Salisbury's death he became a much more importantperson. He still sued for advancement, and still met withdisappointment; the "mean men" still rose above him. The lucrative placeof Master of the Wards was vacated by Salisbury's death. Bacon wastalked of for it, and probably expected it, for he drew up new rules forit, and a speech for the new master; but the office and the speech wentto Sir George Carey. Soon after Sir George Carey died. Bacon thenapplied for it through the new favourite, Rochester. "He was soconfident of the place that he put most of his men into new cloaks;" andthe world of the day amused itself at his disappointment, when the placewas given to another "mean man, " Sir Walter Cope, of whom the gossipswrote that if the "last two Treasurers could look out of their graves tosee those successors in that place, they would be out of countenancewith themselves, and say to the world _quantum mutatus_. " But Bacon'shand and counsel appear more and more in important matters--theimprovement of the revenue; the defence of extreme rights of theprerogative in the case against Whitelocke; the great question ofcalling a parliament, and of the true and "princely" way of dealing withit. His confidential advice to the King about calling a parliament wasmarked by his keen perception of the facts of the situation; it wasmarked too by his confident reliance on skilful indirect methods andtrust in the look of things; it bears traces also of his bitter feelingagainst Salisbury, whom he charges with treacherously fomenting theopposition of the last Parliament. There was no want of worldly wisdomin it; certainly it was more adapted to James's ideas of state-craftthan the simpler plan of Sir Henry Nevill, that the King should throwhimself frankly on the loyalty and good-will of Parliament. And thus hecame to be on easy terms with James, who was quite capable ofunderstanding Bacon's resource and nimbleness of wit. In the autumn of1613 the Chief-Justiceship of the King's Bench became vacant. Bacon atonce gave the King reasons for sending Coke from the Common Pleas--wherehe was a check on the prerogative--to the King's Bench, where he coulddo less harm; while Hobart went to the Common Pleas. The promotion wasobvious, but the Common Pleas suited Coke better, and the place was morelucrative. Bacon's advice was followed. Coke, very reluctantly, knowingwell who had given it, and why, "not only weeping himself but followedby the tears" of all the Court of Common Pleas, moved up to the higherpost. The Attorney Hobart succeeded, and Bacon at last became Attorney(October 27, 1613). In Chamberlain's gossip we have an indication, suchas occurs only accidentally, of the view of outsiders: "There is astrong 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-two, Bacon had gained the place whichEssex had tried to get for him at thirty-two. The time of waiting hadbeen a weary one, and it is impossible not to see that it had beenhurtful to Bacon. A strong and able man, very eager to have a field forhis strength and ability, who is kept out of it, as he thinks unfairly, and is driven to an attitude of suppliant dependency in pressing hisclaim on great persons who amuse him with words, can hardly helpsuffering in the humiliating process. It does a man no good to learn tobeg, and to have a long training in the art. And further, this longdelay kept up the distraction of his mind between the noble work onwhich his soul was bent, and the necessities of that "civil" orprofessional and political life by which he had to maintain his estate. All the time that he was "canvassing" (it is his own word) for office, and giving up his time and thoughts to the work which it involved, thegreat _Instauration_ had to wait his hours of leisure; and hisexclamation, so often repeated, _Multum incola fuit anima mea_, bearswitness to the longings that haunted him in his hours of legal drudgery, or in the service of his not very thankful employers. Not but that hefound compensation in the interest of public questions, in the companyof the great, in the excitement of state-craft and state employment, inthe pomp and enjoyment of court life. He found too much compensation; itwas one of his misfortunes. But his heart was always sound in itsallegiance to knowledge; and if he had been fortunate enough to haverisen earlier to the greatness which he aimed at as a vantage-ground forhis true work, or if he had had self-control to have dispensed withwealth and position--if he had escaped the long necessity of being apersistent and still baffled suitor--we might have had as a completedwhole what we have now only in great fragments, and we should have beenspared the blots which mar a career which ought to have been a nobleone. 

The first important matter that happened after Bacon's new appointmentwas the Essex divorce case, and the marriage of Lady Essex with thefavourite whom Cecil's death had left at the height of power, and whofrom Lord Rochester was now made Earl of Somerset. With the divorce, thebeginning of the scandals and tragedies of James's reign, Bacon hadnothing to do. At the marriage which followed Bacon presented as hisoffering a masque, performed by the members of Gray's Inn, of which hebore the charges, and which cost him the enormous sum of £2000. Whetherit 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 canhardly be said, as has been suggested, to be a protest against the greatabuse of the times, the sale of offices for money. The "very splendidtrifle, the Masque of Flowers, " was one form of the many extravaganttributes paid but too willingly to high-handed worthlessness, of whichthe deeper and darker guilt was to fill all faces with shame two yearsafterwards. 

As Attorney, Bacon had to take a much more prominent part in affairs, legal, criminal, constitutional, administrative, than he had yet beenallowed to have. We know that it was his great object to show how muchmore active and useful an Attorney he could be than either Coke orHobart; and as far as unflagging energy and high ability could make agood public servant, he fully carried out his purpose. In Parliament, the "addled Parliament" of 1614, in which he sat for the University ofCambridge, he did his best to reconcile what were fast becomingirreconcilable, the claims and prerogatives of an absolute king, irritable, suspicious, exacting, prodigal, with the ancient rights andliberties, growing stronger in their demands by being denied, resisted, or outwitted, of the popular element in the State. In the trials, whichare so large and disagreeable a part of the history of theseyears--trials arising out of violent words provoked by the violent actsof power, one of which, Peacham's, became famous, because in the courseof it torture was resorted to, or trials which witnessed to thecorruption of the high society of the day, like the astounding series ofarraignments and condemnations following on the discoveries relating toOverbury's murder, which had happened just before the Somersetmarriage--Bacon had to make the best that he could for the cruel andoften unequal policy of the Court; and Bacon must take his share in theresponsibility for it. An effort on James's part to stop duellingbrought from Bacon a worthier piece of service, in the shape of anearnest and elaborate argument against it, full of good sense and goodfeeling, but hopelessly in advance of the time. On the many questionswhich touched the prerogative, James found in his Attorney a ready andskilful advocate of his claims, who knew no limit to them but in theconsideration of what was safe and prudent to assert. He was a betterand more statesmanlike counsellor, in his unceasing endeavours toreconcile James to the expediency of establishing solid and goodrelations with his Parliament, and in his advice as to the wise andhopeful ways of dealing with it. Bacon had no sympathy with popularwants and claims; of popularity, of all that was called popular, he hadthe deepest suspicion and dislike; the opinions and the judgment ofaverage 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 _people_. " But he had a high idea of what was worthy of aking, and was due to the public interests, and he saw the folly of thepetty acts and haughty words, the use of which James could not resist. In his new office he once more urged on, and urged in vain, hisfavourite project for revising, simplifying, and codifying the law. Thiswas a project which would find little favour with Coke, and the crowd oflawyers who venerated him--men whom Bacon viewed with mingled contemptand apprehension both in the courts and in Parliament where they werenumerous, 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 Report. It is very able and interesting; markedwith his characteristic comprehensiveness and sense of practical needs, and with a confidence in his own knowledge of law which contrastscuriously with the current opinion about it. He speaks with the utmosthonour of Coke's work, but he is not afraid of a comparison with him. "Ido assure your Majesty, " he says, "I am in good hope that when SirEdward Coke's Reports and my Rules and Decisions shall come toposterity, there will be (whatever is now thought) question who was thegreater lawyer. " But the project, though it was entertained anddiscussed in Parliament, came to nothing. No one really cared about itexcept Bacon. 

But in these years (1615 and 1616) two things happened of the utmostconsequence to him. One was the rise, more extravagant than anythingthat England had seen for centuries, and in the end more fatal, of thenew favourite, who from plain George Villiers became the all-powerfulDuke of Buckingham. Bacon, like the rest of the world, saw the necessityof bowing before him; and Bacon persuaded himself that Villiers waspre-eminently endowed with all the gifts and virtues which a man in hisplace would need. We have a series of his letters to Villiers; they areof course in the complimentary vein which was expected; but if theirlanguage is only compliment, there is no language left for expressingwhat a man wishes to be taken for truth. The other matter was thehumiliation, by Bacon's means and in his presence, of his old rivalCoke. In the dispute about jurisdiction, always slumbering and latelyawakened and aggravated by Coke, between the Common Law Courts and theChancery, Coke had threatened the Chancery with Præmunire. The King'sjealousy took alarm, and the Chief-Justice was called before theCouncil. There a decree, based on Bacon's advice and probably drawn upby him, peremptorily overruled the legal doctrine maintained by thegreatest 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 affront were not enough, Coke was suspended from hisoffice, and, further, enjoined to review and amend his publishedreports, where they were inconsistent with the view of law which onBacon's authority the Star Chamber had adopted (June, 1616). This heaffected to do, but the corrections were manifestly only colourable;his explanations of his legal heresies against the prerogative, as theseheresies were formulated by the Chancellor and Bacon, and presented tohim for recantation, were judged insufficient; and in a decree, prefacedby reasons drawn up by Bacon, in which, besides Coke's errors of law, his "deceit, contempt, and slander of the Government, " his "perpetualturbulent carriage, " and his affectation of popularity, were noted--hewas removed from his office (Nov. , 1616). So, for the present, the oldrivalry had ended in a triumph for Bacon. Bacon, whom Coke had so longheaded in the race, whom he had sneered at as a superficial pretender tolaw, and whose accomplishments and enthusiasm for knowledge he utterlydespised, had not only defeated him, but driven him from his seat withdishonour. When we remember what Coke was, what he had thought of Bacon, and how he prized his own unique reputation as a representative ofEnglish law, the effects of such a disgrace on a man of his tempercannot easily be exaggerated. 

But for the present Bacon had broken through the spell which had so longkept him back. He won a great deal of the King's confidence, and theKing was more and more ready to make use of him, though by no meansequally willing to think that Bacon knew better than himself. Bacon'sview of the law, and his resources of argument and expression to make itgood, could be depended upon in the keen struggle to secure and enlargethe prerogative which was now beginning. In the prerogative both Jamesand Bacon saw the safety of the State and the only reasonable hope ofgood government; but in Bacon's larger and more elevated views ofpolicy--of a policy worthy of a great king, and a king of England--Jameswas not likely to take much interest. The memorials which it wasBacon's habit to present on public affairs were wasted on one who had solittle to learn from others--so he thought and so all assured him--aboutthe secrets of empire. Still they were proofs of Bacon's ready mind; andJames, even when he disagreed with Bacon's opinion and arguments, wastoo clever not to see their difference from the work of other men. Baconrose in favour; and from the first he was on the best of terms withVilliers. He professed to Villiers the most sincere devotion. Accordingto his custom he presented him with a letter of wise advice on theduties and behaviour of a favourite. He at once began, and kept up withhim to the end, a confidential correspondence on matters of publicimportance. He made it clear that he depended upon Villiers for his ownpersonal prospects, and it had now become the most natural thing thatBacon should look forward to succeeding the Lord Chancellor, Ellesmere, who was fast failing. Bacon had already (Feb. 12, 1615/16). In termswhich seem strange to us, but were less strange then, set forth in aletter to the King the reasons why he should be Chancellor; criticisingjustly enough, only that he was a party interested, the qualificationsof other possible candidates, Coke, Hobart, and the Archbishop Abbott. Coke would be "an overruling nature in an overruling place, " and"popular men were no sure mounters for your Majesty's saddle. " Hobartwas incompetent. As to Abbott, the Chancellor's place required "a wholeman, " and to have both jurisdiction, spiritual and temporal, "was fitonly for a king. " The promise that Bacon should have the place came tohim three days afterwards through Villiers. He acknowledged it in aburst of gratitude (Feb. 15, 1615/16). "I will now wholly rely on yourexcellent and happy self. .. . I am yours surer to you than my own life. For, as they speak of the Turquoise stone in a ring, I will break intotwenty pieces before you bear the least fall. " They were unconsciouslyprophetic words. But Ellesmere lasted longer than was expected. It wasnot till a year after this promise that he resigned. On the 7th ofMarch, 1616/17, Bacon received the seals. He expresses his obligationsto 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 great 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 your 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. _ 1616/1617). FR. BACON, C. S. "

He himself believed the appointment to be a popular one. "I know I amcome in, " he writes to the King soon after, "with as strong an envy ofsome 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, theduties of his great office and his sense of their obligation. But therewas a curious hesitation in treating him as other men were treated inlike cases. He was only "Lord Keeper. " It was not till the followingJanuary (1617/18) that he received the office of Lord Chancellor. It wasnot till half a year afterwards that he was made a Peer. Then he becameBaron Verulam (July, 1618), and in January, 1620/21, Viscount St. Alban's. 

From this time Bacon must be thought of, first and foremost, as a Judgein the great seat which he had so earnestly sought. It was the place notmerely of law, which often tied the judge's hands painfully, but of truejustice, when law failed to give it. Bacon's ideas of the duties of ajudge were clear and strong, as he showed in various admirable speechesand charges: his duties as regards his own conduct and reputation; hisduties in keeping his subordinates free from the taint of corruption. Hewas not ignorant of the subtle and unacknowledged ways in which unlawfulgains may be covered by custom, and an abuse goes on because men willnot choose to look at it. He entered on his office with the full purposeof doing its work better than it had ever been done. He saw where itwanted reforming, and set himself at once to reform. The accumulationand delay of suits had become grievous; at once he threw his wholeenergy into the task of wiping out the arrears which the bad health ofhis predecessor and the traditional sluggishness of the court had heapedup. In exactly three months from his appointment he was able to reportthat these arrears had been cleared off. "This day" (June 8, 1617), hewrites to Buckingham, "I have made even with the business of the kingdomfor common justice. Not one cause unheard. The lawyers drawn dry of allthe motions they were to make. Not one petition unheard. And this Ithink could not be said in our time before. "

The performance was splendid, and there is no reason to think that thework so rapidly done was not well done. We are assured that Bacon'sdecisions were unquestioned, and were not complained of. At the sametime, before this allegation is accepted as conclusive proof of thepublic satisfaction, it must be remembered that the question of hisadministration of justice, which was at last to assume such strangeproportions, has never been so thoroughly sifted as, to enable us topronounce upon it, it should be. The natural tendency of Bacon's mindwould undoubtedly be to judge rightly and justly; but the negativeargument of the silence at the time of complainants, in days when it wasso dangerous to question authority, and when we have so little evidenceof what men said at their firesides, is not enough to show that he neverfailed. 

But the serious thing is that Bacon subjected himself to two of the mostdangerous influences which can act on the mind of a judge--the influenceof the most powerful and most formidable man in England, and theinfluence of presents, in money and other gifts. From first to last heallowed Buckingham, whom no man, as Bacon soon found, could displeaseexcept at his own peril, to write letters to him on behalf of suitorswhose causes were before him; and he allowed suitors, not often whilethe cause was pending, but sometimes even then, to send him directly, orthrough his servants, large sums of money. Both these things areexplained. It would have been characteristic of Bacon to be confidentthat he could defy temptation: these habits were the fashion of thetime, and everybody took them for granted; Buckingham never asked hisgood offices beyond what Bacon thought just and right, and asked themrather for the sake of expedition than to influence his judgment. And asto the money presents--every office was underpaid; this was the commonway of acknowledging pains and trouble: it was analogous to a doctor'sor a lawyer's fee now. And there is no proof that either influence everled Bacon to do wrong. This has been said, and said with some degree offorce. But if it shows that Bacon was not in this matter below his age, it shows that he was not above it. No one knew better than Bacon thatthere were no more certain dangers to honesty and justice than theinterference and solicitation of the great, and the old famous pest ofbribes, of which all histories and laws were full. And yet on thehighest seat of justice in the realm he, the great reformer of itsabuses, allowed them to make their customary haunt. He did not mean todo wrong: his conscience was clear; he had not given thought to themischief they must do, sooner or later, to all concerned with the Courtof Chancery. With a magnificent carelessness he could afford to runsafely a course closely bordering on crime, in which meaner men wouldsin and be ruined. 

Before six months were over Bacon found on what terms he must stand withBuckingham. By a strange fatality, quite unintentionally, he becamedragged into the thick of the scandalous and grotesque dissensions ofthe Coke family. The Court was away from London in the North; and Cokehad been trying, not without hope of success, to recover the King'sfavour. Coke was a rich man, and Lady Compton, the mother of theVilliers, thought that Coke's daughter would be a good match for one ofher younger sons. It was really a great chance for Coke; but he haggledabout the portion; and the opportunity, which might perhaps have led tohis taking Bacon's place, passed. But he found himself in trouble inother ways; his friends, especially Secretary Winwood, contrived tobring the matter on again, and he consented to the Villiers's terms. Buthis wife, the young lady's mother, Lady Hatton, would not hear of it, and a furious quarrel followed. She carried off her daughter into thecountry. Coke, with a warrant from Secretary Winwood, which Bacon hadrefused to give him, pursued her: "with his son, 'Fighting Clem, ' andten or eleven servants, weaponed, in a violent manner he repaired tothe house where she was remaining, and with a piece of timber or formbroke open the door and dragged her along to his coach. " Lady Hattonrushed 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. The door-keeper fulfilled her desire, and in the 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 my Lord's anger, and got his warrant and my Lo. Treasurer'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 theirarmed parties, did not meet on the road, in which case "there were liketo be strange tragedies. " At length the Council compelled both sides tokeep the peace, and the young lady was taken for the present out of thehands of her raging parents. Bacon had assumed that the affair was theresult of an intrigue between Winwood and Coke, and that the Court wouldtake part against Coke, a man so deep in disgrace and so outrageouslyviolent. Supposing that he had the ear of Buckingham, he wroteearnestly, persuading him to put an end to the business; and in themeantime the Council ordered Coke to be brought before the Star Chamber"for riot and force, " to "be heard and sentenced as justice shallappertain. " They had not the slightest doubt that they were doing whatwould please the King. A few days after they met, and then they learnedthe 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 [_word illegible_] there said was subject to a _præmunire_; 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 with all true affection, whereas others did it out of faction and ambition--which words glancing directly at our 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 responsum. _"

None indeed, but blank faces, and thoughts of what might come next. TheCouncil, and Bacon foremost, had made a desperate mistake. "It isevident, " as Mr. Spedding says, "that he had not divined Buckingham'sfeelings on the subject. " He was now to learn them. To his utteramazement and alarm he found that the King was strong for the match, andthat the proceeding of the Council was condemned at Court as grossmisconduct. In vain he protested that he was quite willing to forwardthe match; that in fact he had helped it. Bacon's explanations, and hiswarnings against Coke the King "rejected with some disdain;" hejustified Coke's action; he charged Bacon with disrespect andingratitude to Buckingham; he put aside his arguments and apologies asworthless or insincere. Such reprimands had not often been addressed, even to inferior servants. Bacon's letters to Buckingham remained atfirst without notice; when Buckingham answered he did so with scornfuland menacing curtness. Meanwhile Bacon heard from Yelverton how thingswere 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 went on to say, "did nobly and plainly tell me he wouldnot secretly bite, but whosoever had had any interest, or tasted of theopposition to his brother's marriage, he would as openly oppose them totheir faces, and they should discern what favour he had by the power hewould use. " The Court, like a pack of dogs, had set upon Bacon. "It istoo common in every man's mouth in Court that your greatness shall beabated, and as your tongue hath been as a razor unto some, so shalltheirs be to you. " Buckingham said to every one that Bacon had beenforgetful of his kindness and unfaithful to him: "not forbearing in openspeech to tax you, as if it were an inveterate custom with you, to beunfaithful unto him, as you were to the Earls of Essex and Somerset. "

All this while Bacon had been clearly in the right. He had thrusthimself into no business that did not concern him. He had not, asBuckingham accuses him of having done, "overtroubled" himself with themarriage. He had done his simple duty as a friend, as a councillor, as ajudge. He had been honestly zealous for the Villiers's honour, andwarned Buckingham of things that were beyond question. He had curbedCoke's scandalous violence, perhaps with no great regret, but withmanifest reason. But for this he was now on the very edge of losing hisoffice; it was clear to him, as it is clear to us, that nothing couldsave him but absolute submission. He accepted the condition. How thissubmission was made and received, and with what gratitude he found thathe was forgiven, may be seen in the two following letters. Buckinghamthus extends his grace to the Lord Keeper, and exhorts him to betterbehaviour:

 "But his Majesty's direction in answer of your letter hath given me occasion to join hereunto a discovery unto you of mine inward 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 towards you I went to sound his Majesty's intention how he means to behave himself 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 exemplary mark upon you, as I protest the sight of his deep-conceived indignation quenched my 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 disgrace upon you, and, as I dare say, no other person would have been patiently heard in this suit by his Majesty 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 particular mark of disgrace upon your person. Only thus far his Majesty protesteth, that upon the conscience 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 innumerable 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 conclude, 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 (your Lordship's old friend) participate of the comfort and honour that will thereby come to you. Thus I rest at last

 "Your Lordship's faithful friend and servant, "G. B. "

 "MY EVER BEST LORD, now better than yourself, --Your Lordship'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 my 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, 1617. FR. 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 atrue friend "ought rather to go against his mind than his good, " was notwhat Buckingham expected from him. And he never ventured on it again. Itis not too much to say that a man who could write as he now did toBuckingham, could not trust himself in any matter in which Buckingham, was interested. 

But the reconciliation was complete, and Bacon took his place more andmore as one of the chief persons in the Government. James claimed somuch to have his own way, and had so little scruple in putting aside, inhis superior wisdom, sometimes very curtly, Bacon's or any otherperson's recommendations, that though his services were great, and werenot unrecognised, he never had the power and influence in affairs towhich his boundless devotion to the Crown, his grasp of business, andhis willing industry, ought to have entitled him. He was still aservant, and made to feel it, though a servant in the "first form. " Itwas James and Buckingham who determined the policy of the country, orsettled the course to be taken in particular transactions; when this wassettled, it was Bacon's business to carry it through successfully. Inthis he was like all the other servants of the Crown, and like them hewas satisfied with giving his advice, whether it were taken or not; butunlike many of them he was zealous in executing with the utmost vigourand skill the instructions which were given him. Thus he was required tofind the legal means for punishing Raleigh; and, as a matter of duty, hefound them. He was required to tell the Government side of the story ofRaleigh's crimes and punishment--which really was one side of the story, only not by any means the whole; and he told it, as he had told theGovernment story against Essex, with force, moderation, and good sense. Himself, he never would have made James's miserable blunders aboutRaleigh; but the blunders being made, it was his business to do his bestto help the King out of them. When Suffolk, the Lord Treasurer, wasdisgraced and brought before the Star Chamber for corruption andembezzlement in his office, Bacon thought that he was doing no more thanhis duty in keeping Buckingham informed day by day how the trial wasgoing on; how he had taken care that Suffolk's submission should notstop it--"for all would be but a play on the stage if justice went noton in the right course;" how he had taken care that the evidence wentwell--"I will not say I sometime holp it, as far as was fit for ajudge;" how, "a little to warm the business" . .. "I spake a word, thathe that did draw or milk treasure from Ireland, did not, _emulgere_, milk money, but blood. " This, and other "little things" like it, whilehe was sitting as a judge to try, if the word may be used, a personalenemy of Buckingham, however bad the case might be against Suffolk, sound strange indeed to us; and not less so when, in reporting thesentence and the various opinions of the Council about it, he, for once, praises Coke for the extravagance of his severity: "Sir Edward Coke didhis part--I have not heard him do better--and began with 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 thingsconsidered, it is not amiss, and might easily have been worse. "

In all this, which would have been perfectly natural from anAttorney-General of the time, Bacon saw but his duty, even as a judgebetween the Crown and the subject. It was what was expected of thosewhom the King chose to employ, and whom Buckingham chose to favour. Buta worse and more cruel case, illustrating the system which a man likeBacon could think reasonable and honourable, was the disgrace andpunishment of Yelverton, the Attorney-General, the man who had stood byBacon, and in his defence had faced Buckingham, knowing wellBuckingham's dislike of himself, when all the Court turned against Baconin his quarrel with Coke and Lady Compton. Towards the end of the year1620, on the eve of a probable meeting of Parliament, there was greatquestioning about what was to be done about certain patents andmonopolies--monopolies for making gold and silk thread, and forlicensing inns and ale-houses--which were in the hands of Buckingham'sbrothers and their agents. The monopolies were very unpopular; there wasalways doubt as to their legality; they were enforced oppressively andvexatiously by men like Michell and Mompesson, who acted for theVilliers; and the profits of them went, for the most part, not into theExchequer, but into the pockets of the hangers-on of Buckingham. Bacondefended them both in law and policy, and his defence is thought by Mr. Gardiner to be not without grounds; but he saw the danger of obstinacyin maintaining what had become so hateful in the country, and stronglyrecommended that the more indefensible and unpopular patents should bespontaneously given up, the more so as they were of "no great fruit. "But Buckingham's insolent perversity "refused to be convinced. " TheCouncil, when the question was before them, decided to maintain them. Bacon, who had rightly voted in the minority, thus explains his own voteto Buckingham: "The King did wisely put it upon and consult, whether thepatents were at this time to be removed by Act of Council beforeParliament. _I opined (but yet somewhat like Ovid's mistress, thatstrove, but yet as one that would be overcome), that yes!_" But in thevarious disputes which had arisen about them, Yelverton had shown thathe very much disliked the business of defending monopolies, and sendingLondon citizens to jail for infringing them. He did it, but he did itgrudgingly. It was a great offence in a man whom Buckingham had alwaysdisliked; and it is impossible to doubt that what followed was theconsequence of his displeasure. 

 "In drawing up a new charter for the city of London, " writes Mr. Gardiner, "Yelverton inserted clauses for which he was unable 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 pleasure. "

In the management of this business Bacon had the chief part. Yelverton, on his suspension, at once submitted. The obnoxious clauses are not saidto have been of serious importance, but they were new clauses which theKing had not sanctioned, and it would be a bad precedent to pass oversuch unauthorised additions even by an Attorney-General. "I mistook manythings, " said Yelverton afterwards, in words which come back into ourminds at a later period, "I was improvident in some things, and toocredulous in all things. " It might have seemed that dismissal, if not asevere reprimand, was punishment enough. But the submission was notenough, in Bacon's opinion, "for the King's honour. " He dwelt on thegreatness 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 notethe wisdom of the law of England, which termeth the highest contempt andexcesses of authority _Misprisions_; which (if you take the sound andderivation of the word) is but _mistaken_; but if you take the use andacception of the word, it is high and heinous contempt and usurpation ofauthority; whereof the reason I take to be and the name excellentlyimposed, for that main mistaking, it is ever joined with contempt; forhe that reveres will not easily mistake; but he that slights, and thinksmore of the greatness of his place than of the duty of his place, willsoon commit misprisions. " The day would come when this doctrine would bepressed with ruinous effect against Bacon himself. But now he expoundedwith admirable clearness the wrongness of carelessness about warrantsand of taking things for granted. He acquitted his former colleague of"corruption of reward;" but "in truth that makes the offence ratherdivers 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 thenext day, " says Mr. Spedding, "he reported to Buckingham the result ofthe proceeding, " and takes no small credit for his own part in it. 

It was thus that the Court used Bacon, and that Bacon submitted to beused. He could have done, if he had been listened to, much noblerservice. He had from the first seen, and urged as far as he could, theparamount necessity of retrenchment in the King's profligateexpenditure. Even Buckingham had come to feel the necessity of it atlast; and now that Bacon filled a seat at the Council, and that theprosecution of Suffolk and an inquiry into the abuses of the Navy hadforced on those in power the urgency of economy, there was a chance ofsomething 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 wider, under thedirection of Lionel Cranfield, a self-made man of business from thecity; but with such a Court the task was an impossible one. It was notBacon's fault, though he sadly mismanaged his own private affairs, thatthe King's expenditure was not managed soberly and wisely. Nor was itBacon's fault, as far as advice went, that James was always tryingeither to evade or to outwit a Parliament which he could not, like theTudors, overawe. Bacon's uniform counsel had been--Look on a Parliamentas a certain necessity, but not only as a necessity, as also a uniqueand most precious means for uniting the Crown with the nation, andproving to the world outside how Englishmen love and honour their King, and their King trusts his subjects. Deal with it frankly and nobly asbecomes a king, not suspiciously like a huckster in a bargain. Do not beafraid of Parliament. Be skilful in calling it, but don't attempt to"pack" it. Use all due adroitness and knowledge of human nature, andnecessary firmness and majesty, in managing it; keep unruly andmischievous people in their place, but do not be too anxious tomeddle--"let nature work;" and above all, though of course you wantmoney from it, do not let that appear as the chief or real cause ofcalling it. Take the lead in legislation. Be ready with some interestingor imposing points of reform, or policy, about which you ask yourParliament to take counsel with you. Take care to "frame and have readysome commonwealth bills, that may add respect to the King's governmentand acknowledgment of his care; not _wooing_ bills to make the King andhis graces cheap, but good matter to set the Parliament on work, that anempty stomach do not feed on humour. " So from the first had Bacon alwaysthought; so he thought when he watched, as a spectator, James's blunderswith his first Parliament of 1604; so had he earnestly counselled James, when admitted to his confidence, as to the Parliaments of 1614 and 1615;so again, but in vain, as Chancellor, he advised him to meet theParliament of 1620. It was wise, and from his point of view honestadvice, though there runs all through it too much reliance onappearances which were not all that they seemed; there was too muchthought of throwing dust in the eyes of troublesome and inconvenientpeople. But whatever motives there might have been behind, it would havebeen 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 myancestors should ever have permitted such an institution as the House ofCommons to have come into existence. I am a stranger, and found it herewhen I arrived, so that I am obliged to put up with what I cannot getrid of. " James was the only one of our many foreign kings who, to thelast, struggled to avoid submitting himself to the conditions of anEnglish throne. 

CHAPTER VI. 

BACON'S FALL. 

When Parliament met on January 30, 1620/21, and Bacon, as LordChancellor, set forth in his ceremonial speeches to the King and to theSpeaker the glories and blessings of James's reign, no man in Englandhad more reason to think himself fortunate. He had reached the age ofsixty, and had gained the object of his ambition. More than that, he wasconscious that in his great office he was finding full play for hispowers and his high public purposes. He had won greatly on theconfidence of the King. He had just received a fresh mark of honour fromhim: a few days before he had been raised a step in the peerage, and hewas now Viscount St. Alban's. With Buckingham he seemed to be on termsof the most affectionate familiarity, exchanging opinions freely withhim on every subject. And Parliament met in good-humour. They votedmoney at once. One of the matters which interested Bacon most--therevision of the Statute Book--they took up as one of their firstmeasures, and appointed a Select Committee to report upon it. And what, amid the apparent felicity of the time, was of even greater personalhappiness to Bacon, the first step of the "Great Instauration" had beentaken. During the previous autumn, Oct. 12, 1620, the _Novum Organum_, the first instalment of his vast design, was published, the result ofthe work of thirty years; and copies were distributed to great people, among others to Coke. He apprehended no evil; he had nothing to fear, and much to hope from the times. 

His sudden and unexpected fall, so astonishing and so irreparablycomplete, is one of the strangest events of that still imperfectlycomprehended time. There had been, and were still to be, plenty ofinstances of the downfall of power, as ruinous and even more tragic, though scarcely any one more pathetic in its surprise and its shame. Butit is hard to find one of which so little warning was given, and thecauses of which are at once in part so clear, and in part so obscure andunintelligible. Such disasters had to be reckoned upon as possiblechances by any one who ventured into public life. Montaigne advises thatthe discipline of pain should be part of every boy's education, for thereason that every one in his day might be called upon to undergo thetorture. And so every public man, in the England of the Tudors andStuarts, entered on his career with the perfectly familiar expectationof possibly closing it--it might be in an honourable and ceremoniousfashion, in the Tower and on the scaffold--just as he had to lookforward to the possibility of closing it by small-pox or the plague. Sothat when disaster came, though it might be unexpected, as death isunexpected, it was a turn of things which ought not to take a man bysurprise. But some premonitory signs usually gave warning. There wasnothing to warn Bacon that the work which he believed he was doing sowell would be interrupted. 

We look in vain for any threatenings of the storm. What the men of histime thought and felt about Bacon it is not easy to ascertain. Appearances are faint and contradictory; he himself, though scornful ofjudges who sought to be "popular, " believed that he "came in with thefavour of the general;" that he "had a little popular reputation, whichfolloweth me whether I will or no. " No one for years had discharged theduties of his office with greater efficiency. Scarcely a trace remainsof any suspicion, previous to the attack upon him, of the justice of hisdecisions; no instance was alleged that, in fact, impure motives hadcontrolled the strength and lucidity of an intellect which loved to betrue and right for the mere pleasure of being so. Nor was there anythingin Bacon's political position to make him specially obnoxious above allothers of the King's Council. He maintained the highest doctrines ofprerogative; but they were current doctrines, both at the Council boardand on the bench; and they were not discredited nor extinguished by hisfall. To be on good terms with James and Buckingham meant a degree ofsubservience which shocks us now; but it did not shock people then, andhe did not differ from his fellows in regarding it as part of his dutyas a public servant of the Crown. No doubt he had enemies--some with oldgrudges like Southampton, who had been condemned with Essex; some likeSuffolk, smarting under recent reprimands and the biting edge of Bacon'stongue; some like Coke, hating him from constitutional antipathies andthe strong antagonism of professional doctrines, for a long course ofrivalry and for mortifying defeats. But there is no appearance ofpreconcerted efforts among them to bring about his overthrow. He did notat the time seem to be identified with anything dangerous or odious. There was no doubt a good deal of dissatisfaction with Chancery--amongthe common lawyers, because it interfered with their business; in thepublic, partly from the traditions of its slowness, partly from itsexpensiveness, partly because, being intended for special redress oflegal hardship, it was sure to disappoint one party to a suit. But Baconthought that he had reformed Chancery. He had also done a great deal tobring some kind of order, or at least hopefulness of order, into theKing's desperate finances. And he had never set himself againstParliament. On the contrary, he had always been forward to declare thatthe King could not do without Parliament, and that Parliament onlyneeded to be dealt with generously, and as "became a King, " to be not adanger and hindrance to the Crown but its most sincere and trustworthysupport. 

What was then to portend danger to Bacon when the Parliament of 1620/21met? The House of Commons at its meeting was thoroughly loyal andrespectful; it meant to be _benedictum et pacificum parliamentum_. Everyone knew that there would be "grievances" which would not be welcome tothe Court, but they did not seem likely to touch him. Every one knewthat there would be questions raised about unpopular patents andoppressive monopolies, and about their legality; and it was pretty wellagreed upon at Court that they should be given up as soon as complainedof. But Bacon was not implicated more than the Crown lawyers before him, in what all the Crown lawyers had always defended. There wasdissatisfaction about the King's extravagance and wastefulness, abouthis indecision in the cause of the Elector Palatine, about his supposedintrigues with Papistical and tyrannical Spain; but Bacon had nothing todo with all this except, as far as he could, to give wise counsel andwarning. The person who made the King despised and hated was thesplendid and insolent favourite, Buckingham. It might have been thoughtthat the one thing to be set against much that was wrong in the Statewas the just and enlightened and speedy administration of equity in theChancery. 

When Parliament met, though nothing seemed to threaten mischief, it metwith a sturdy purpose of bringing to account certain delinquents whosearrogance and vexations of the subjects had provoked the country, andwho were supposed to shelter themselves under the countenance ofBuckingham. Michell and Mompesson were rascals whose misdemeanors mightwell try the patience of a less spirited body than an English House ofCommons. Buckingham could not protect them, and hardly tried to do so. But just as one electric current "induces" another by neighbourhood, soall this deep indignation against Buckingham's creatures created afierce temper of suspicion about corruption all through the publicservice. Two Committees were early appointed by the House of Commons:one a Committee on Grievances, such as the monopolies; the other, aCommittee to inquire into abuses in the Courts of Justice and receivepetitions about them. In the course of the proceedings, the questionarose in the House as to the authorities or "referees" who had certifiedto the legality of the Crown patents or grants which had been so grosslyabused; and among these "referees" were the Lord Chancellor and otherhigh officers, both legal and political. 

It was the little cloud. But lookers-on like Chamberlain did not thinkmuch of it. "The referees, " he wrote on Feb. 29th, "who certified thelegality of the patents are glanced at, but they are chiefly above thereach of the House; they attempt so much that they will accomplishlittle. " Coke, who was now the chief leader in Parliament, began to talkominously of precedents, and to lay down rules about the power of theHouse to punish--rules which were afterwards found to have no authorityfor them. Cranfield, the representative of severe economy, insisted thatthe honour of the King required that the referees, whoever they were, should be called to account. The gathering clouds shifted a little, whenthe sense of the House seemed to incline to giving up all retrospectiveaction, and to a limitation for the future by statute of thequestionable prerogative--a limitation which was in fact attempted by abill thrown out by the Lords. But they gathered again when the Commonsdetermined to bring the whole matter before the House of Lords. The Kingwrote to warn Bacon of what was coming. The proposed conference wasstaved off 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 thistime--the beginning of March--seemed now to have become clear, first, that under the general attack on the referees was intended a blowagainst Bacon; next, that the person whom he had most reason to fear wasSir Edward Coke. 

The storm was growing; but Bacon was still unalarmed, though Buckinghamhad been frightened into throwing the blame on the referees. 

 "I do hear, " he writes to Buckingham (dating his letter on March 7th, "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 the 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 forgentler measures. But he was able to make it listen to his harshercounsels, and from this time his hand appears in all that was done. Thefirst conference was a tame and dull one. The spokesmen had been slackin their disagreeable and perhaps dangerous duty. But Coke and hisfriends took them sharply to task. "The heart and tongue of Sir EdwardCoke are true relations, " said one of his fervent supporters; "but hispains hath not reaped that harvest of praise that he hath deserved. Forthe referees, they are as transcendent delinquents as any other, andsure their souls made a wilful elopement from their bodies when theymade these certificates. " A second conference was held with the Lords, and this time the charge was driven home. The referees were named, theChancellor at the head of them. When Bacon rose to explain and justifyhis acts he was sharply stopped, and reminded that he was transgressingthe orders of the House in speaking till the Committees were named toexamine the matter. What was even more important, the King had come tothe House of Lords (March 10th), and frightened, perhaps, about hissubsidies, told them "that he was not guilty of those grievances whichare now discovered, but that he grounded his judgement upon others whohave misled him. " The referees would be attacked, people thought, if theLower House had courage. 

All this was serious. As things were drifting, it seemed as if Baconmight have to fight the legal question of the prerogative in the form ofa criminal charge, and be called upon to answer the accusation of beingthe minister of a crown which legal language pronounced absolute, and ofa King who interpreted legal language to the letter; and further, tomeet his accusers after the King himself had disavowed what his servanthad done. What passed between Bacon and the King is confused anduncertain; but after his speech the King could scarcely have thought ofinterfering with the inquiry. The proceedings went on; Committees werenamed for the several points of inquiry; and Bacon took part in thesearrangements. It was a dangerous position to have to defend himselfagainst an angry House of Commons, led and animated by Coke andCranfield. But though the storm had rapidly thickened, the chargesagainst the referees were not against him alone. His mistake in law, ifit was a mistake, was shared by some of the first lawyers and firstcouncillors in England. There was a battle before him, but not ahopeless one. "_Modicæ fidei, quare dubitasti_" he writes about thistime to an anxious friend. 

But in truth the thickening storm had been gathering over his headalone. It was against him that the whole attack was directed; as soon asit took a different shape, the complaints against the other referees, such as the Chief-Justice, who was now Lord Treasurer, though someattempt was made to press them, were quietly dropped. What was thesecret history of these weeks we do not know. But the result of Bacon'sruin was that Buckingham was saved. "As they speak of the Turquoisestone in a ring, " Bacon had said to Buckingham when he was madeChancellor, "I will break into twenty pieces before you have the leastfall. " Without knowing what he pledged himself to, he was taken at hisword. 

At length the lightning fell. During the early part of March, whilethese dangerous questions were mooted about the referees, a Committee, appointed early in the session, had also been sitting on abuses incourts of justice, and as part of their business, an inquiry had beengoing on into the ways of the subordinate officers of the Court ofChancery. Bacon had early (Feb. 17th) sent a message to the Committeecourting full inquiry, "willingly consenting that any man might speakanything of his Court. " On the 12th of March the chairman, Sir R. Philips, reported that he had in his hands "divers petitions, manyfrivolous and clamorous, many of weight and consequence. " Cranfield, whopresided over the Court of Wards, had quarrelled fiercely with theChancery, where he said there was "neither Law, Equity, nor Conscience, "and pressed the inquiry, partly, it may be, to screen his own Court, which was found fault with by the lawyers. Some scandalous abuses werebrought to light in the Chancery. They showed that "Bacon was at faultin the art of government, " and did not know how to keep his servants inorder. One of them, John Churchill, an infamous forger of Chanceryorders, finding things going hard with him, and "resolved, " it is said, "not to sink alone, " offered his confessions of all that was going onwrong in the Court. But on the 15th of March things took another turn. It was no longer a matter of doubtful constitutional law; no longer aquestion of slack discipline over his officers. To the astonishment, ifnot of the men of his own day, at least to the unexhausted astonishmentof times following, a charge was suddenly reported from the Committee tothe Commons against the Lord Chancellor, not of straining theprerogative, or of conniving at his servants' misdoings, but of beinghimself a corrupt and venal judge. Two suitors charged him withreceiving bribes. Bacon was beginning to feel worried and anxious, andhe wrote thus to Buckingham. At length he had begun to see the meaningof all these inquiries, and to what they were driving. 

 "MY VERY GOOD LORD, --Your Lordship spake of Purgatory. I am now in it, but my 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. "

The first charges attracted others, which were made formal matters ofcomplaint by the House of Commons. John Churchill, to save himself, wasbusy setting down cases of misdoing; and probably suitors of themselvesbecame ready to volunteer evidence. But of this Bacon as yet knewnothing. He was at this time only aware that there were persons who were"hunting out complaints against him, " that the attack was changed fromhis law to his private character; he had found an unfavourable feelingin the House of Lords; and he knew well enough what it was to havepowerful enemies in those days when a sentence was often settled beforea trial. To any one, such a state of things was as formidable as thefirst serious symptoms of a fever. He was uneasy, as a man might well beon whom the House of Commons had fixed its eye, and to whom the House ofLords had shown itself unfriendly. But he was as yet conscious ofnothing fatal to his defence, and he knew that if false accusationscould be lightly made they could also be exposed. 

A few days after the first mention of corruption the Commons laid theircomplaints of him before the House of Lords, and on the same day (March19) Bacon, finding himself too ill to go to the House, wrote to thePeers by Buckingham, requesting them that as some "complaints of basebribery" had come before them, they would give him a fair opportunity ofdefending himself, and of cross-examining witnesses; especially begging, that considering the number of decrees which he had to make in ayear--more than two thousand--and "the courses which had been taken inhunting out complaints against him, " they would not let their opinion ofhim be affected by the mere number of charges that might be made. Theirshort verbal answer, moved by Southampton (March 20), that they meant toproceed by right rule of justice, and would be glad if he cleared hishonour, was not encouraging. And now that the Commons had brought thematter before them, the Lords took it entirely into their own hands, appointing three Committees, and examining the witnesses themselves. Newwitnesses came forward every day with fresh cases of gifts and presents, "bribes" received by the Lord Chancellor. When Parliament rose for theEaster vacation (March 27-April 17), the Committees continued sitting. Agood deal probably passed of which no record remains. When the Commonsmet again (April 17) Coke was full of gibes about _InstauratioMagna_--the true _Instauratio_ was to restore laws--and two days afteran Act was brought in for review and reversal of decrees in Courts ofEquity. It was now clear that the case against Bacon had assumedformidable dimensions, and also a very strange, and almost monstrousshape. For the Lords, who were to be the judges, had by their Committeestaken the matter out of the hands of the Commons, the original accusers, and had become themselves the prosecutors, collecting and arrangingevidence, accepting or rejecting depositions, and doing all thatcounsel or the committing magistrate would do preliminary to a trial. There appears to have been no cross-examining of witnesses on Bacon'sbehalf, or hearing witnesses for him--not unnaturally at this stage ofbusiness, when the prosecutors were engaged in making out their owncase; but considering that the future judges had of their own accordturned themselves into the prosecutors, the unfairness was great. At thesame time it does not appear that Bacon did anything to watch how thingswent in the Committees, which had his friends in them as well as hisenemies, and are said to have been open courts. Towards the end ofMarch, Chamberlain wrote to Carleton that "the Houses were working hardat cleansing out the Augæan stable of monopolies, and also extortions inCourts of Justice. The petitions against the Lord Chancellor were toonumerous to be got through: his chief friends and brokers of bargains, Sir George Hastings and Sir Richard Young, and others attacked, areobliged to accuse him in their own defence, though very reluctantly. Hisordinary bribes were £300, £400, and even £1000. .. . The Lords admit noevidence except on oath. One Churchill, who was dismissed from theChancery Court for extortion, is the chief cause of the Chancellor'sruin. "[3] Bacon was greatly alarmed. He wrote to Buckingham, who was"his anchor in these floods. " He wrote to the King; he was at a loss toaccount for the "tempest that had come on him;" he could not understandwhat he had done to offend the country or Parliament; he had never"taken rewards to pervert justice, however he might be frail, andpartake of the abuse of the time. "

 "Time hath been when I have brought unto you _genitum columbæ_, 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 avaricious oppressor 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 _abyssus_ of misery) towards me. I have been ever your man, and counted myself but an usufructuary of myself, the property being yours; and now making myself an oblation to do with me as may best conduce to the honour of your justice, the honour of your mercy, and the use of your service, resting as

 "Clay in your Majesty's gracious hands, "Fr. St. Aldan, Canc. "March 25, 1621. "

To the world he kept up an undismayed countenance: he went down toGorhambury, attended by troops of friends. "This man, " said PrinceCharles, when he met his company, "scorns to go out like a snuff. " Butat Gorhambury he made his will, leaving "his name to the next ages andto foreign nations;" and he wrote a prayer, which is a touching evidenceof his state of mind--

 "Most gracious Lord God, my merciful Father, from my youth up, my Creator, my Redeemer, my Comforter. Thou (O Lord) soundest and searchest the depths and secrets of all hearts; thou knowledgest the upright of heart, thou judgest the hypocrite, 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 (O 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 brightness of thy sanctuary. This vine which thy right hand hath planted in this nation, I have 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 the 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 superfluity 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 transgressions; but thy sanctifications have remained with me, and my heart, through thy grace, hath been an unquenched coal upon thy altar. O Lord, my strength, I have since my youth met with thee in all my ways, by thy fatherly compassions, by thy comfortable chastisements, and by thy most visible providence. As thy favours have increased upon me, so have thy corrections; so as thou hast been alway near me, O 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 humiliation before thee. 

 "And now when I thought most of peace 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 no 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 (O Lord) for my Saviour's sake, and receive me into thy bosom, or guide me in thy ways. "

Bacon up to this time strangely, if the Committees were "open Courts, "was entirely ignorant of the particulars of the charge which wasaccumulating against him. He had an interview with the King, which wasduly reported to the House, and he placed his case before James, distinguishing between the "three cases of bribery supposed in ajudge--a corrupt bargain; carelessness in receiving a gift while thecause is going on; and, what is innocent, receiving a gift after it isended. " And he meant in such words as these to place himself at theKing's disposal, and ask his direction:

 "For my fortune, _summa summarum_ with me is, that 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 _delivré_ 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 King referred him to the House; and the House now (April 19th)prepared to gather up into "one brief" the charges against the LordChancellor, still, however, continuing open to receive fresh complaints. 

Meanwhile the chase after abuses of all kinds was growing hotter in theCommons--abuses in patents and monopolies, which revived the complaintsagainst referees, among whom Bacon was frequently named, and abuses inthe Courts of Justice. The attack passed by and spared the Common LawCourts, as was noticed in the course of the debates; it sparedCranfield's Court, the Court of Wards. But it fell heavily on theChancery and the Ecclesiastical Courts. "I have neither power nor willto defend Chancery, " said Sir John Bennett, the judge of the PrerogativeCourt; but a few weeks after his turn came, and a series of as uglycharges as could well be preferred against a judge, charges of extortionas well as bribery, were reported to the House by its Committee. Therecan be no doubt of the grossness of many of these abuses, and the zealagainst them was honest, though it would have shown more courage if ithad flown at higher game; but the daily discussion of them helped tokeep alive and inflame the general feeling against so great a"delinquent" as the Lord Chancellor was supposed to be. And, indeed, twoof the worst charges against him were made before the Commons. One was astatement made in the House by Sir George Hastings, a member of theHouse, who had been the channel of Awbry's gift, that when he had toldBacon that if questioned he must admit it, Bacon's answer was: "George, if you do so, I must deny it upon my honour--upon my oath. " The otherwas that he had given an opinion in favour of some claim of the Mastersin Chancery for which he received £1200, and with which he said that allthe judges agreed--an assertion which all the judges denied. Of thesecharges there is no contradiction. [4]

Bacon made one more appeal to the King (April 21). He hoped that, byresigning the seal, he might be spared the sentence:

 "But now if not _per omnipotentiam_ (as the divines speak), but _per potestatem suaviter disponentem_, your Majesty will graciously save me from a sentence with the good liking of the House, and that cup may pass from me; it is the utmost of my desires. 

 "This I move with 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 hundred years as any furder severity. "

At length, informally, but for the first time distinctly, the fullnature of the accusation, with its overwhelming list of cases, came toBacon's knowledge (April 20 or 21). From the single charge, made in themiddle of March, it had swelled in force and volume like a risingmountain torrent. That all these charges should have sprung out of theground from their long concealment is strange enough. How is it thatnothing was heard of them when the things happened? And what is equallystrange is that these charges were substantially true and undeniable;that this great Lord Chancellor, so admirable in his despatch ofbusiness, hitherto so little complained of for wrong or unfairdecisions, had been in the habit of receiving large sums of money fromsuitors, in some cases certainly while the suit was pending. Andfurther, while receiving them, while perfectly aware of the evil ofreceiving gifts on the seat of judgment, while emphatically warninginferior judges against yielding to the temptation, he seems really tohave continued unconscious of any wrong-doing while gift after gift wasoffered and accepted. But nothing is so strange as the way in whichBacon met the charges. Tremendous as the accusation was, he made not theslightest fight about it. Up to this time he had held himself innocent. Now, overwhelmed and stunned, he made no attempt at defence; he threw upthe game without a struggle, and volunteered an absolute and unreservedconfession of his guilt--that is to say, he declined to stand his trial. Only, he made an earnest application to the House of Lords, inproceeding to sentence, to be content with a general admission ofguilt, and to spare him the humiliation of confessing the separate factsof alleged "bribery" which were contained in the twenty-eight Articlesof his accusation. This submission, "grounded only on rumour, " for theArticles 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 beenread, for a long time. " But they did not mean that he should escape withthis. The House treated the suggestion with impatient scorn (April 24). "It is too late, " said Lord Saye. "No word of confession of anycorruption in the Lord Chancellor's submission, " said Southampton; "itstands with the justice and honour of this House not to proceed withoutthe parties' particular confession, or to have the parties to hear thecharge, and we to hear the parties answer. " The demand of the Lords wasstrictly just, but cruel; the Articles were now sent to him; he had beencharged with definite offences; he must answer yes or no, confess themor defend himself. A further question arose whether he should not besent for to appear at the bar. He still held the seals. "Shall the GreatSeal come to the bar?" asked Lord Pembroke. It was agreed that he was tobe asked whether he would acknowledge the particulars. His answer was"that he will make no manner of defence to the charge, but meaneth toacknowledge corruption, and to make a particular confession to everypoint, and after that a humble submission. But he humbly craves libertythat, when the charge is more full than he finds the truth of the fact, he may make a declaration of the truth in such particulars, the chargebeing brief and containing not all the circumstances. " And such aconfession he made. "My Lords, " he said, to those who were sent to askwhether he would stand to it, "it is my act, my hand, my heart. Ibeseech your Lordships be merciful to a broken reed. " This was, ofcourse, followed by a request to the King from the House to "sequester"the Great Seal. A commission was sent to receive it (May 1). "The worse, the better, " he answered to the wish, "that it had been better withhim. " "By the King's great favour I received the Great Seal; by my owngreat fault I have lost it. " They intended him now to come to the bar toreceive his sentence. But he was too ill to leave his bed. They did notpush 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 talkedof every extremity short of death. Coke, indeed, in the Commons, fromhis store of precedents, had cited cases where judges had been hangedfor bribery. But the Lords would not hear of this. "His offences foul, "said Lord Arundel; "his confession pitiful. Life not to be touched. " ButSouthampton, whom twenty years before he had helped to involve inEssex's ruin, urged that he should be degraded from the peerage; andasked whether, at any rate, "he whom this House thinks unfit to be aconstable shall come to the Parliament. " He was fined £40, 000. He was tobe imprisoned in the Tower during the King's pleasure. He was to beincapable of any office, place, or employment in the State orCommonwealth. He was never to sit in Parliament or come within the vergeof the Court. This was agreed to, Buckingham only dissenting. "The LordChancellor is so sick, " he said, "that he cannot live long. "

What is the history of this tremendous catastrophe by which, in lessthan two months, Bacon was cast down from the height of fortune tobecome a byword of shame? He had enemies, who certainly were glad, butthere is no appearance that it was the result of any plot orcombination against him. He was involved, accidentally, it may almost besaid, in the burst of anger excited by the intolerable dealings ofothers. The indignation provoked by Michell and Mompesson and theirassociates at that particular moment found Bacon in its path, doing, asit seemed, in his great seat of justice, even worse than they; and whenhe threw up all attempt at defence, and his judges had his hand to anunreserved confession of corruption, both generally, and in the longlist of cases alleged against him, it is not wonderful that they came tothe conclusion, as the rest of the world did, that he was as bad as theaccusation painted him--a dishonest and corrupt judge. Yet it is strangethat they should not have observed that not a single charge of adefinitely unjust decision was brought, at any rate was proved, againsthim. He had taken money, they argued, and therefore he must be corrupt;but if he had taken money to pervert judgment, some instance of theiniquity would certainly have been brought forward and proved. There isno such instance to be found; though, of course, there were plenty ofdissatisfied suitors; of course the men who had paid their money andlost their cause were furious. But in vain do we look for any case ofproved injustice. The utmost that can be said is that in some cases heshowed favour in pushing forward and expediting suits. So that the realcharge against Bacon assumes, to us who have not to deal practicallywith dangerous abuses, but to judge conduct and character, a differentcomplexion. Instead of being the wickedness of perverting justice andselling his judgments for bribes, it takes the shape of allowing andsharing in a dishonourable and mischievous system of payment forservice, which could not fail to bring with it temptation anddiscredit, and in which fair reward could not be distinguished fromunlawful gain. Such a system it was high time to stop; and in this roughand harsh way, which also satisfied some personal enmities, it wasstopped. We may put aside for good the charge on which he was condemned, and which in words he admitted--of being corrupt as a judge. His realfault--and it was a great one--was that he did not in time open his eyesto the wrongness and evil, patent to every one, and to himself as soonas pointed out, of the traditional fashion in his court of eking out byirregular gifts the salary of such an office as his. 

Thus Bacon was condemned both to suffering and to dishonour; and, as hasbeen observed, condemned without a trial. But it must also be observedthat it was entirely owing to his own act that he had not a trial, andwith a trial the opportunity of cross-examining witnesses and ofexplaining openly the matters urged against him. The proceedings in theLords were preliminary to the trial; when the time came, Bacon, of hisown choice, stopped them from going farther, by his confession andsubmission. Considering the view which he claimed to take of his owncase, his behaviour was wanting in courage and spirit. From the momentthat the attack on him shifted from a charge of authorising illegalmonopolies to a charge of personal corruption, he never fairly met hisaccusers. The distress and anxiety, no doubt, broke down his health; andtwice, 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 toleave his bed. But between the time of the first charge and hiscondemnation seven weeks elapsed; and though he was able to go down toGorhambury, he never in that time showed himself in the House of Lords. Whether or not, while the Committees were busy in collecting thecharges, he would have been allowed to take part, to put questions tothe witnesses, or to produce his own, he never attempted to do so; andby the course he took there was no other opportunity. To have stood histrial could hardly have increased his danger, or aggravated hispunishment; and it would only have been worthy of his name and place, ifnot to have made a fight for his character and integrity, at least tohave bravely said what he had made up his mind to admit, and what no onecould have said more nobly and pathetically, in open Parliament. But hewas cowed at the fierceness of the disapprobation manifest in bothHouses. He shrunk from looking his peers and his judges in the face. Hisfriends obtained for him that he should not be brought to the bar, andthat all should pass in writing. But they saved his dignity at theexpense of his substantial reputation. The observation that the chargesagainst him were not sifted by cross-examination applies equally to hisanswers to them. The allegations of both sides would have come down tous in a more trustworthy shape if the case had gone on. But to give upthe struggle, and to escape by any humiliation from a regular publictrial, seems to have been his only thought when he found that the Kingand Buckingham could not or would not save him. 

But the truth is that he knew that a trial of this kind was a trial onlyin name. He knew that, when a charge of this sort was brought, it wasnot meant to be really investigated in open court, but to be driven homeby proofs carefully prepared beforehand, against which the accused hadlittle chance. He knew, too, that in those days to resist in earnest anaccusation was apt to be taken as an insult to the court whichentertained it. And further, for the prosecutor to accept a submissionand confession without pushing to the formality of a public trial, andtherefore a public exposure, was a favour. It was a favour which by hisadvice, as against the King's honour, had been refused to Suffolk; itwas a favour which, in a much lighter charge, had by his advice beenrefused to his colleague Yelverton only a few months before, when Bacon, in sentencing him, took occasion to expatiate on the heinous guilt ofmisprisions or mistakes in men in high places. The humiliation was notcomplete without the trial, but it was for humiliation and not fairinvestigation that the trial was wanted. Bacon knew that the trial wouldonly prolong his agony, and give a further triumph to his enemies. 

That there was any plot against Bacon, and much more that Buckingham tosave 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 considering what Buckinghamwas, and what he dared to do when he pleased, he was singularly cool inhelping Bacon. Williams, the astute Dean of Westminster, who was to beBacon's successor as Lord Keeper, had got his ear, and advised him notto 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 wasshocked at the Chancellor's conduct; he would not have believed that itcould have been so bad; his disgrace was richly deserved. Buckinghamkept up appearances by saying a word for him from time to time inParliament, which he knew would be useless, and which he certainly tookno measures to make effective. It is sometimes said that Buckinghamnever knew what dissimulation was. He was capable, at least, of theperfidy and cowardice of utter selfishness. Bacon's conspicuous falldiverted men's thoughts from the far more scandalous wickedness of thegreat favourite. But though there was no plot, though the blow fell uponBacon almost accidentally, there were many who rejoiced to be able todrive 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 thetime that Essex pressed Bacon against Coke in vain to the day when Baconas Chancellor drove Coke from his seat for his bad law, and as PrivyCouncillor ordered him to be prosecuted in the Star Chamber forriotously breaking open men's doors to get his daughter. The two menthoroughly disliked and undervalued one another. Coke made light ofBacon's law. Bacon saw clearly Coke's narrowness and ignorance out ofthat limited legal sphere in which he was supposed to know everything, his prejudiced and interested use of his knowledge, his coarseness andinsolence. But now in Parliament Coke was supreme, "our Hercules, " ashis friends said. He posed as the enemy of all abuses and corruption. Hebrought his unrivalled, though not always accurate, knowledge of law andhistory to the service of the Committees, and took care that theChancellor's name should not be forgotten when it could be connectedwith some bad business of patent or Chancery abuse. It was the greatrevenge of the Common Law on the encroaching and insulting Chancerywhich had now proved so foul. And he could not resist the opportunity ofmarking the revenge of professional knowledge over Bacon's airs ofphilosophical superiority. "To restore things to their original" was hissneer in Parliament, "this, _Instauratio Magna. Instaurareparas--Instaura leges justitiamque prius_. "[5]

The charge of corruption was as completely a surprise to Bacon as it wasto the rest of the world. And yet, as soon as the blot was hit, he sawin a moment that his position was hopeless--he knew that he had beendoing wrong; though all the time he had never apparently given it athought, and he insisted, what there is every reason to believe, that nopresent had induced him to give an unjust decision. It was the power ofcustom over a character naturally and by habit too pliant tocircumstances. Custom made him insensible to the evil of receivingrecommendations from Buckingham in favour of suitors. Custom made himinsensible to the evil of what it seems every one took forgranted--receiving gifts from suitors. In the Court of James I. Theatmosphere which a man in office breathed was loaded with the taint ofgifts and bribes. Presents were as much the rule, as indispensable forthose who hoped to get on, as they are now in Turkey. Even inElizabeth's days, when Bacon was struggling to win her favour, and wasin the greatest straits for money, he borrowed £500 to buy a jewel forthe Queen. When he was James's servant the giving of gifts became anecessity. New Year's Day brought round its tribute of gold vases andgold pieces to the King and Buckingham. And this was the least. Moneywas raised by the sale of officers and titles. For £20, 000, havingpreviously offered £10, 000 in vain, the Chief-Justice of England, Montague, became Lord Mandeville and Treasurer. The bribe was sometimesdisguised: a man became a Privy Councillor, like Cranfield, or aChief-Justice, like Ley (afterwards "the good Earl, " "unstained withgold or fee, " of Milton's Sonnet), by marrying a cousin or a niece ofBuckingham. When Bacon was made a Peer, he had also given him "themaking of a Baron;" that is to say, he might raise money by bargainingwith some one who wanted a peerage; when, however, later on, he askedBuckingham for a repetition of the favour, Buckingham gave him a lectureon the impropriety of prodigality, which should make it seem that "whilethe King was asking money of Parliament with one hand he was giving withthe other. " How things were in Chancery in the days of the Queen, and ofBacon's predecessors, we know little; but Bacon himself implies thatthere was nothing new in what he did. "All my lawyers, " said James, "areso bred and nursed in corruption that they cannot leave it. " Bacon'sChancellorship coincided with the full bloom of Buckingham's favour; andBuckingham set the fashion, beyond all before him, of extravagance inreceiving and spending. Encompassed by such assumptions and suchcustoms, Bacon administered the Chancery. Suitors did there what peopledid everywhere else; they acknowledged by a present the trouble theygave, or the benefit they gained. It may be that Bacon's knowndifficulties about money, his expensive ways and love of pomp, hiseasiness of nature, his lax discipline over his servants, encouragedthis 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 onwithout affecting his purpose to do justice "from the greatest to thegroom. " A stronger character, a keener conscience, would have faced thequestion, not only whether he was not setting the most ruinous ofprecedents, but whether any man could be so sure of himself as to go ondealing justly with gifts in his hands. But Bacon, who never dared toface the question, what James was, what Buckingham was, let himself bespellbound by custom. He knew in the abstract that judges ought to havenothing to do with gifts, and had said so impressively in his charges tothem. Yet he went on self-complacent, secure, almost innocent, buildingup a great tradition of corruption in the very heart of English justice, till the challenge of Parliament, which began in him its terrible andrelentless, but most unequal, prosecution of justice against ministerswho had betrayed the commonwealth in serving the Crown, woke him fromhis dream, and made him see, as others saw it, the guilt of a greatjudge who, under whatever extenuating pretext, allowed the suspicion toarise that he might sell justice. "In the midst of a state of as greataffliction as mortal man can endure, " he wrote to the Lords of theParliament, in making his submission, "I shall begin with the professinggladness in some things. The first is that hereafter the greatness of ajudge or magistrate shall be no sanctuary or protection of guiltiness, which is the beginning of a golden world. The next, that after thisexample it is like that judges will fly from anything that is in thelikeness of corruption as from a serpent. " Bacon's own judgment onhimself, deliberately repeated, is characteristic, and probably comesnear the truth. "Howsoever, I acknowledge the sentence just and forreformation's sake fit, " he writes to Buckingham from the Tower, where, for form's sake, he was imprisoned for a few miserable days, he yet hadbeen "the justest Chancellor that hath been in the five changes thathave been since Sir Nicolas Bacon's time. " He repeated the same thingyet more deliberately in later times. "_I was the justest judge that wasin England these fifty years. But it was the justest censure inParliament that was these two hundred years. _"

He might have gone on to add, "the Wisest Counsellor; and yet none onwhom rested heavier blame; none of whom England might more justlycomplain. " Good counsels given, submissive acquiescence in theworst--this is the history of his statesmanship. Bacon, whose eye waseverywhere, was not sparing of his counsels. On all the great questionsof the time he has left behind abundant evidence, not only of what hethought, but of what he advised. And in every case these memorials aremarked with the insight, the independence, the breadth of view, and themoderation of a mind which is bent on truth. He started, of course, froma basis which we are now hardly able to understand or allow for, theidea of absolute royal power and prerogative which James had enlargedand hardened out of the Kingship of the Tudors, itself imperious andarbitrary enough, but always seeking, with a tact of which James wasincapable, to be in touch and sympathy with popular feeling. But it wasa basis which in principle every one of any account as yet held orprofessed to hold, and which Bacon himself held on grounds of philosophyand reason. He could see no hope for orderly and intelligent governmentexcept in a ruler whose wisdom had equal strength to assert itself; andhe looked down with incredulity and scorn on the notion of anything goodcoming out of what the world then knew or saw of popular opinion orparliamentary government. But when it came to what was wise and fittingfor absolute power to do in the way of general measures and policy, hewas for the most part right. He saw the inexorable and pressingnecessity of putting the finance of the kingdom on a safe footing. Hesaw the necessity of a sound and honest policy in Ireland. He saw themischief of the Spanish alliance in spite of his curious friendship withGondomar, and detected the real and increasing weakness of the Spanishmonarchy, which still awed mankind. He saw the growing danger of abusesin Church and State which were left untouched, and were protected by thepunishment of those who dared to complain of them. He saw the confusionand injustice of much of that common law of which the lawyers were soproud; and would have attempted, if he had been able, to emulateJustinian, and anticipate the Code Napoleon, by a rational andconsistent digest. Above all, he never ceased to impress on James theimportance, and, if wisely used, the immense advantages, of hisParliaments. Himself, for great part of his life, an active and popularmember of the House of Commons, he saw that not only it was impossibleto do without it, but that, if fairly, honourably, honestly dealt with, it would become a source of power and confidence which would double thestrength of the Government both at home and abroad. Yet of all thiswisdom nothing came. The finance of the kingdom was still ruined byextravagance and corruption in a time of rapidly-developing prosperityand wealth. The wounds of Ireland were unhealed. It was neither peacenor war with Spain, and hot infatuation for its friendship alternatedwith cold fits of distrust and estrangement. Abuses flourished andmultiplied under great patronage. The King's one thought aboutParliament was how to get as much money out of it as he could, with aslittle other business as possible. Bacon's counsels were the propheciesof Cassandra in that so prosperous but so disastrous reign. All that hedid was to lend the authority of his presence, in James's most intimatecounsels, to policy and courses of which he saw the unwisdom and theperils. James and Buckingham made use of him when they wanted. But theywould have been very different in their measures and their statesmanshipif they had listened to him. 

Mirabeau said, what of course had been said before him, "On ne vaut, dans la partie exécutive de la vie humaine, que par le caractère. " Thisis the key to Bacon's failures as a judge and as a statesman, and why, knowing so much more and judging so much more wisely than James andBuckingham, he must be identified with the misdoings of that ignoblereign. He had the courage of his opinions; but a man wants more thanthat: he needs the manliness and the public spirit to enforce them, ifthey are true and salutary. But this is what Bacon had not. He did notmind being rebuffed; he knew that he was right, and did not care. But tostand up against the King, to contradict him after he had spoken, topress an opinion or a measure on a man whose belief in his own wisdomwas infinite, to risk not only being set down as a dreamer, but theKing's displeasure, and the ruin of being given over to the will of hisenemies, this Bacon had not the fibre or the stiffness or theself-assertion to do. He did not do what a man of firm will and strengthof purpose, a man of high integrity, of habitual resolution, would havedone. Such men insist when they are responsible, and when they knowthat they are right; and they prevail, or accept the consequences. Bacon, knowing all that he did, thinking all that he thought, wascontent to be the echo and the instrument of the cleverest, thefoolishest, the vainest, the most pitiably unmanly of English kings. 

FOOTNOTES:

[3] _Calendar of State Papers_ (domestic), March 24, 1621. 

[4] _Commons' Journals_, March 17, April 27; iii. 560, 594-6. 

[5] _Commons' Journals_, iii. 578. In his copy of the _Novum Organum_, received _ex dono auctoris_, Coke wrote the same words. 

 "_Auctori consilium_. Instaurare paras veterum documenta sophorum: Instaura leges justitiamque prius. "

He added, with allusion to the ship in the frontispiece of the _NovumOrganum_, "It deserveth not to be read in schools, But to be freighted in the ship of Fools. "

CHAPTER VII. 

BACON'S LAST YEARS. 

[1621-1626. ]

The tremendous sentences of those days, with their crushing fines, wereoften worse in sound than in reality. They meant that for the moment aman was defeated and disgraced. But it was quite understood that it didnot necessarily follow that they would be enforced in all theirseverity. The fine might be remitted, the imprisonment shortened, theban of exclusion taken off. At another turn of events or caprice the manhimself might return to favour, and take his place in Parliament or theCouncil as if nothing had happened. But, of course, a man might havepowerful enemies, and the sentence might be pressed. His fine might beassigned to some favourite; and he might be mined, even if in the longrun he was pardoned; or he might remain indefinitely a prisoner. Raleighhad remained to perish at last in dishonour. Northumberland, Raleigh'sfellow-prisoner, after fifteen years' captivity, was released this year. The year after Bacon's condemnation such criminals as Lord and LadySomerset were released from the Tower, after a six years' imprisonment. Southampton, the accomplice of Essex, Suffolk, sentenced as late as 1619by Bacon for embezzlement, sat in the House of Peers which judged Bacon, and both of them took a prominent part in judging him. 

To Bacon the sentence was ruinous. It proved an irretrievable overthrowas regards public life, and, though some parts of it were remitted andothers lightened, it plunged his private affairs into trouble whichweighed heavily on him for his few remaining years. To his deep distressand horror he had to go to the Tower to satisfy the terms of hissentence. "Good my Lord, " he writes to Buckingham, May 31, "procure mywarrant for my discharge this day. Death is so far from being unwelcometo me, as I have called for it as far as Christian resolution wouldpermit any time these two months. But to die before the time of hisMajesty's grace, in this disgraceful place, is even the worst that couldbe. " He was released after two or three days, and he thanks Buckingham(June 4) for getting him out to do him and the King faithfulservice--"wherein, by the grace of God, your Lordship shall find that myadversity hath neither _spent_ nor _pent_ my spirits. " In the autumn hisfine was remitted--that is, it was assigned to persons nominated byBacon, who, as the Crown had the first claim on all his goods, served asa protection against his other creditors, who were many and some of themclamorous--and it was followed by his pardon. His successor, Williams, now Bishop of Lincoln, who stood in great fear of Parliament, tried tostop the pardon. The assignment of the fine, he said to Buckingham, wasa gross job--"it is much spoken against, not for the matter (for no manobjects to that), but for the manner, which is full of knavery, and awicked precedent. For by this assignment he is protected from all hiscreditors, which (I dare say) was neither his Majesty's nor yourLordship's meaning. " It was an ill-natured and cowardly piece ofofficial pedantry to plunge deeper a drowning man; but in the end thepardon was passed. It does not appear whether Buckingham interfered tooverrule the Lord Keeper's scruples. Buckingham was certainly about thistime very much out of humour with Bacon, for a reason which, more thananything else, discloses the deep meanness which lurked under his showof magnanimity and pride. He had chosen this moment to ask Bacon forYork House. This meant that Bacon would never more want it. Even Baconwas stung by such a request to a friend in his condition, and declinedto part with it; and Buckingham accordingly was offended, and made Baconfeel it. Indeed, there is reason to think with Mr. Spedding that for thesealing of his pardon Bacon was indebted to the good offices with theKing, not of Buckingham, but of the Spaniard, Gondomar, with whom Baconhad always been on terms of cordiality and respect, and who at this timecertainly "brought about something on his behalf, which his otherfriends 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 comewithin the verge of the Court, which meant that he could not live inLondon. His affairs were in great disorder, his health was bad, and hewas cut off from books. He wrote an appeal to the Peers who hadcondemned him, asking them to intercede with the King for theenlargement of his liberty. "I am old, " he wrote, "weak, ruined, inwant, a very subject of pity. " The Tower at least gave him theneighbourhood of those who could help him. "There I could have company, physicians, conference with my creditors and friends about my debts andthe necessities of my estate, helps for my studies and the writings Ihave in hand. Here I live upon the sword-point of a sharp air, endangered if I go abroad, dulled if I stay within, solitary andcomfortless, without company, banished from all opportunities to treatwith any to do myself good, and to help out my wrecks. " If the Lordswould recommend his suit to the King, "You shall do a work of charityand nobility, you shall do me good, you shall do my creditors good, andit may be you shall do posterity good, if out of the carcase of dead androtten greatness (as out of Samson's lion) there may be honey gatheredfor the use of future times. " But Parliament was dissolved before thetouching appeal reached them; and Bacon had to have recourse to otherexpedients. He consulted Selden about the technical legality of thesentence. He appealed to Buckingham, who vouchsafed to appear moreplacable. Once more he had recourse to Gondomar, "in that solitude offriends, which is the base-court of adversity, " as a man whom he had"observed to have the magnanimity of his own nation and the cordialityof ours, and I am sure the wit of both"--and who had been equally kindto him in "both his fortunes;" and he proposed through Gondomar topresent Gorhambury to Buckingham "for nothing, " as a peace-offering. Butthe purchase of his liberty was to come in another way. Bacon hadreconciled himself to giving up York House; but now Buckingham would nothave it: he had found another house, he said, which suited him as well. That is to say, he did not now choose to have York House from Baconhimself; but he meant to have it. Accordingly, Buckingham let Bacon knowthrough a friend of Bacon's, Sir Edward Sackville, that the price of hisliberty to live in London was the cession of York House--not toBuckingham, but of all men in the world, to Lionel Cranfield, the manwho had been so bitter against Bacon in the House of Commons. This isSir Edward Sackville's account to Bacon of his talk with Buckingham; itis characteristic of every one concerned:

 "In the forenoon he laid the law, but in the afternoon he preached the gospel; when, after some revivations of the old distaste 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 write 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 will 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 that now he had no reason to be much offended. 

 "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 showed you London from Highgate. _If York House were gone, the town were yours_, and all your straitest shackles clean off, besides more comfort than the city air only. The Marquis would be exceeding glad the Treasurer had it. This I know; yet 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 Marquis 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 Mr. 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 with 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 may be 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 with 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 you about it, desire may be more clearly manifested than as yet it hath been; since as I remember none hitherto hath told you _in terminis terminantibus_ that the Marquis desires you should gratify the Treasurer. I know that way the hare runs, and that my Lord Marquis longs until Cranfield hath it; and so I wish too, for your good; yet 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 immediate 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 be said that when Cranfield got it, it soon passed intoBuckingham's hands. "Bacon consented to part with his house, andBuckingham in return consented to give him his liberty. " Yet Bacon couldwrite to him, "low as I am, I had rather sojourn in a college inCambridge than recover a good fortune by any other but yourself. " "Asfor York House, " he bids Toby Matthews to let Buckingham know, "that_whether in a straight line or a compass line_, I meant it for hisLordship, in the way which I thought might please him best. " But libertydid not mean either money or recovered honour. All his life long he hadmade light of being in debt; but since his fall this was no longer acondition 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 memore good now than double a twelvemonth hence. I have lost six thousandby the year, besides caps and courtesies. Two things I may assure yourLordship. The one, that I shall lead such a course of life as whatsoeverthe King doth for me shall rather sort to his Majesty's and yourLordship's honour than to envy; the other, that whatsoever men talk, Ican play the good husband, and the King's bounty shall not be lost. "

It might be supposed from the tone of these applications that Bacon'smind was bowed down and crushed by the extremity of his misfortune. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In his behaviour during hisaccusation there was little trace of that high spirit and fortitudeshown by far inferior men under like disasters. But the moment thetremendous strain of his misfortunes was taken off, the vigour of hismind recovered itself. The buoyancy of his hopefulness, the elasticityof his energy, are as remarkable as his profound depression. When theend was approaching, his thoughts turned at once to other work to bedone, ready in plan, ready to be taken up and finished. At the close ofhis last desperate letter to the King he cannot resist finishing at oncewith a jest, and with the prospect of two great literary undertakings--

 "This is my last suit which I shall make to your Majesty in this business, prostrating myself at your mercy seat, after fifteen years service, wherein I have served your Majesty in my poor endeavours with 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 precipitated altogether. But because he that hath taken bribes is apt to give bribes, I will go furder, and present your Majesty with a bribe. For if your Majesty will 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 Tower did, indeed, to use a word of the time, "mate" him. But themoment he was out of it, his quick and fertile mind was immediately atwork in all directions, reaching after all kinds of plans, making proofof all kinds of expedients to retrieve the past, arranging all kinds ofwork according as events might point out the way. His projects forhistory, for law, for philosophy, for letters, occupy quite as much ofhis thoughts as his pardon and his debts; and they, we have seen, occupied a good deal. If he was pusillanimous in the moment of thestorm, his spirit, his force, his varied interests, returned the momentthe storm was past. His self-reliance, which was boundless, revived. Henever allowed himself to think, however men of his own time might judgehim, that the future world would mistake him. "_Aliquis fui intervivos_, " he writes to Gondomar, "_neque omnino intermoriar apudposteros_. " Even in his time he did not give up the hope of beingrestored to honour and power. He compared himself to Demosthenes, toCicero, to Seneca, to Marcus Livius, who had been condemned for corruptdealings as he had been, and had all recovered favour and position. Lookers-on were puzzled and shocked. "He has, " writes Chamberlain, "nomanner of feeling of his fall, but continuing vain and idle in all hishumours as when he was at the highest. " "I am said, " Bacon himselfwrites, "to have a feather in my head. "

Men were mistaken. His thoughts were, for the moment, more than everturned to the future; but he had not given up hope of having a good dealto say yet to the affairs of the present. Strangely enough, as it seemsto us, in the very summer after that fatal spring of 1621 the Kingcalled for his opinion concerning the reformation of Courts of Justice;and Bacon, just sentenced for corruption and still unpardoned, proceedsto give his advice as if he were a Privy Councillor in confidentialemployment. Early in the following year he, according to his fashion, surveyed his position, and drew up a paper of memoranda, like the notesof the _Commentarius Solutus_ of 1608, about points to be urged to theKing at an interview. Why should not the King employ him again? "YourMajesty never chid me;" and as to his condemnation, "as the fault wasnot against your Majesty, so my fall was not your act. " "Therefore, " hegoes on, "if your Majesty do at any time find it fit for your affairs toemploy me publicly upon the stage, I shall so live and spend my time asneither discontinuance shall disable me nor adversity shall discourageme, nor anything that I do give any new scandal or envy upon me. " Heinsists very strongly that the King's service never miscarried in hishands, for he simply carried out the King's wise counsels. "That hisMajesty's business never miscarried in my hands I do not impute to anyextraordinary ability in myself, but to my freedom from any particular, either 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 thatfountain--a bucket to draw forth, a cistern to preserve. " He is notafraid of the apparent slight to the censure passed on him byParliament. "For envy, it is an almanack of the old year, and as afriend of mine said, _Parliament died penitent towards me_. " "What theKing bestows on me will be further seen than on Paul's steeple. " "Therebe mountebanks, as well in the civil body as in the natural; I everserved his Majesty with modesty; no shouting, no undertaking. " In theodd fashion of the time--a fashion in which no one more delighted thanhimself--he lays hold of sacred words to give point to his argument. 

 "I may allude to the three petitions of the Litany--_Libera nos Domine_; _parce nobis, Domine_; _exaudi 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 affairs. In the second, he hath done it in my fine and pardon. In the third, he hath likewise performed, in restoring to the light of his countenance. "

But if the King did not see fit to restore him to public employment, hewould be ready to give private counsel; and he would apply himself toany "literary province" that the King appointed. "I am like groundfresh. If I be left to myself I will graze and bear natural philosophy;but if the King will plough me up again, and sow me with anything, Ihope to give him some yield. " "Your Majesty hath power; I have faith. Therefore a miracle may be wrought. " And he proposes, for matters inwhich his pen might be useful, first, as "active" works, the recompilingof laws; the disposing of wards, and generally the education of youth;the regulation of the jurisdiction of Courts; and the regulation ofTrade; and for "contemplative, " the continuation of the history of HenryVIII. ; a general treatise _de Legibus et Justitia_; and the "Holy War"against the Ottomans. 

When he wrote this he had already shown what his unquelled energy couldaccomplish. In the summer and autumn after his condemnation, amid allthe worries and inconveniences of that time, moving about from place toplace, without his books, and without free access to papers and records, he had written his _History of Henry VII_. The theme had, no doubt, beenlong in his head. But the book was the first attempt at philosophicalhistory in the language, and it at once takes rank with all that theworld had yet seen, in classical times and more recently in Italy, ofsuch history. He sent the book, among other persons, to the Queen ofBohemia, with a phrase, the translation of a trite Latin commonplace, which may have been the parent of one which became famous in our time;and with an expression of absolute confidence in the goodness of his ownwork. 

 "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 without Honour_. .. . But my desire is now to have _Leisure without Loitering_, and not to become an abbey-lubber, as the old 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 angry with me for not flattering him, as well pleased in seeing himself so truly described in colours that will last and be believed. "

But the tide had turned against him for good. A few fair words, a fewgrudging doles of money to relieve his pressing wants, and thosesometimes intercepted and perhaps never rightly granted from anExchequer which even Cranfield's finance could not keep filled, were allthe graces that descended upon him from those fountains of goodness inwhich he professed to trust with such boundless faith. The King did notwant him, perhaps did not trust him, perhaps did not really like him. When the _Novum Organum_ came out, all that he had to say about it wasin the shape of a profane jest that "it was like the peace of God--itpassed all understanding. " Other men had the ear of Buckingham; shrewd, practical men of business like Cranfield, who hated Bacon's loose andcareless ways, or the clever ecclesiastic Williams, whose counsel hadsteered Buckingham safely through the tempest that wrecked Bacon, andwho, with no legal training, had been placed in Bacon's seat. "Ithought, " said Bacon, "that I should have known my successor. " Williams, for his part, charged Bacon with trying to cheat his creditors, when hisfine was remitted. With no open quarrel, Bacon's relations to Buckinghambecame more ceremonious and guarded; the "My singular good Lord" of theformer letters becomes, now that Buckingham had risen so high and Baconhad sunk so low, "Excellent Lord. " The one friend to whom Bacon hadonce wished to owe everything had become the great man, now only to beapproached with "sweet meats" and elaborate courtesy. But it was no use. His full pardon Bacon did not get, though earnestly suing for it, thathe might not "die in ignominy. " He never sat again in Parliament. TheProvostship of Eton fell vacant, and Bacon's hopes were kindled. "Itwere a pretty cell for my fortune. The College and School I do not doubtbut I shall make to flourish. " But Buckingham had promised it to somenameless follower, and by some process of exchange it went to Sir HenryWotton. His English history was offered in vain. His digest of the Lawswas offered in vain. In vain he wrote a memorandum on the regulation ofusury; notes of advice to Buckingham; elaborate reports and notes ofspeeches about a war with Spain, when that for a while loomed before thecountry. In vain he affected an interest which he could hardly have feltin the Spanish marriage, and the escapade of Buckingham and PrinceCharles, which "began, " he wrote, "like a fable of the poets, butdeserved all in a piece a worthy narration. " In vain, when the Spanishmarriage was off and the French was on, he proposed to offer toBuckingham "his service to live a summer as upon mine own delight atParis, to settle a fast intelligence between France and us;" "I havesomewhat of the French, " he said, "I love birds, as the King doth. "Public patronage and public employment were at an end for him. Hispetitions to the King and Buckingham ceased to be for office, but forthe clearing of his name and for the means of living. It is piteous toread the earnestness of his requests. "Help me (dear Sovereign lord andmaster), pity me so far as that I who have borne a bag be not now in myage forced in effect to bear a wallet. " The words are from acarefully-prepared and rhetorical letter which was not sent, but theyexpress what he added to a letter presenting the _De Augmentis; "detVestra Majestas obolum Belisario_. " Again, "I prostrate myself at yourMajesty's feet; I your ancient servant, now sixty-four years old in age, and three years and five months old in misery. I desire not from yourMajesty means, nor place, nor employment, but only after so long a timeof expiation, a complete and total remission of the sentence of theUpper 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, butmay be to your Majesty, as I am to God, _nova creatura_. " But the pardonnever came. Sir John Bennett, who had been condemned as a corrupt judgeby the same Parliament, and between whose case and Bacon's there was asmuch difference, "I will not say as between black and white, but asbetween black and gray, " had got his full pardon, "and they say shallsit in Parliament. " Lord Suffolk had been one of Bacon's judges. "I hopeI deserve not to be the only outcast. " But whether the Court did notcare, or whether, as he once suspected, there was some old enemy likeCoke, who "had a tooth against him, " and was watching any favour shownhim, he died without his wish being fulfilled, "to live out of want andto die out of ignominy. "

Bacon was undoubtedly an impoverished man, and straitened in his means;but this must be understood as in relation to the rank and positionwhich he still held, and the work which he wanted done for the_Instauratio_. His will, dated a few months before his death, shows thatit would be a mistake to suppose that he was in penury. He no doubtoften wanted ready money, and might be vexed by creditors. But he kept alarge household, and was able to live in comfort at Gray's Inn or atGorhambury. A man who speaks in his will of his "four coach geldingsand his best caroache, " besides many legacies, and who proposes to foundtwo lectures at the universities, may have troubles about debts and becramped in his expenditure, but it is only relatively to his stationthat he can be said to be poor. And to subordinate officers of theTreasury who kept him out of his rights, he could still write a sharpletter, full of his old force and edge. A few months before his death hethus wrote to the Lord Treasurer Ley, who probably had made somedifficulty about a claim for money:

 "MY LORD, --I humbly entreat your Lordship, and (if I may use the word) advise your Lordship to make me a better answer. Your Lordship is interested 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 wind 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 howBishop Williams, when he was Lord Keeper, had charged Bacon with"knavery" and "deceiving his creditors" in the arrangements about hisfine, it is not a little strange to find that at the end of his lifeBacon had so completely made friends with him that he chose him as theperson to whom he meant to leave his speeches and letters, which he was"willing should not be lost, " and also the charge of superintending twofoundations of £200 a year for Natural Science at the universities. Andthe Bishop accepted the charge. 

The end of this, one of the most pathetic of histories, was at hand;the end was not the less pathetic because it came in so homely afashion. On a cold day in March he stopped his coach in the snow on hisway to Highgate, to try the effect of cold in arresting putrefaction. Hebought a hen from a woman by the way, and stuffed it with snow. He wastaken 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 apologyfor using his house. He did not write the letter as a dying man. Butdisease had fastened on him. A few days after, early on Easter morning, April 9, 1626, he passed away. He was buried at St. Albans, in theChurch of St. Michael, "the only Christian church within the walls ofold Verulam. " "For my name and memory, " he said in his will, "I leave itto men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages. "So he died: the brightest, richest, largest mind but one, in the agewhich had seen Shakespeare and his fellows; so bright and rich and largethat there have been found those who identify him with the writer of_Hamlet_ and _Othello_. That is idle. Bacon could no more have writtenthe plays than Shakespeare could have prophesied the triumphs of naturalphilosophy. So ended a career, than which no other in his time hadgrander and nobler aims--aims, however mistaken, for the greatness andgood of England; aims for the enlargement of knowledge and truth, andfor the benefit of mankind. So ended a career which had mounted slowlyand painfully, but resolutely, to the highest pinnacle ofgreatness--greatness full of honour and beneficent activity--suddenly toplunge down to depths where honour and hope were irrecoverable. Soclosed, in disgrace and disappointment and neglect, the last sad chapterof a life which had begun so brightly, which had achieved such permanenttriumphs, which had lost itself so often in the tangles of insincerityand evil custom, which was disfigured and marred by great misfortunes, and still more by great mistakes of his own, which was in many waysmisunderstood not only by his generation but by himself, but which heleft in the constant and almost unaccountable faith that it would beunderstood and greatly honoured by posterity. With all its glories, itwas the greatest shipwreck, the greatest tragedy, of an age which sawmany. 

But in these gloomy and dreary days of depression and vain hope to whichhis letters bear witness--"three years and five months old in misery, "again later, "a long cleansing week of five years' expiation andmore"--his interest in his great undertaking and his industry neverflagged. The King did not want what he offered, did not want hishistories, did not want his help about law. Well, then, he had work ofhis own on which his heart was set; and if the King did not want histime, he had the more for himself. Even in the busy days of hisChancellorship he had prepared and carried through the press the _NovumOrganum_, which he published on the very eve of his fall. It was one ofthose works which quicken a man's powers, and prove to him what he cando; and it had its effect. His mind was never more alert than in theseyears of adversity, his labour never more indefatigable, his powers ofexpression never more keen and versatile and strong. Besides thepolitical writings of grave argument for which he found time, these fiveyears teem with the results of work. In the year before his death hesketched out once more, in a letter to a Venetian correspondent, FraFulgenzio, the friend of Sarpi, the plan of his great work, on which hewas still busy, though with fast diminishing hopes of seeing itfinished. To another foreign correspondent, a professor of philosophyat Annecy, and a distinguished mathematician, Father Baranzan, who hadraised some questions about Bacon's method, and had asked what was to bedone with metaphysics, he wrote in eager acknowledgment of the interestwhich his writings had excited, and insisting on the paramountnecessity, above everything, of the observation of facts and of naturalhistory, out of which philosophy may be built. But the mostcomprehensive view of his intellectual projects in all directions, "thefullest account of his own personal feelings and designs as a writerwhich we have from his own pen, " is given in a letter to the venerablefriend of his early days, Bishop Andrewes, who died a few months afterhim. Part, he says, of his _Instauratio_, "the work in mine ownjudgement (_si nunquam fallit imago_) I do most esteem, " has beenpublished; but because he "doubts that it flies too high over men'sheads, " he proposes "to draw it down to the sense" by examples ofNatural History. He has enlarged and translated the _Advancement_ intothe _De Augmentis_. "Because he could not altogether desert the civilperson that he had borne, " he had begun a work on Laws, intermediatebetween philosophical jurisprudence and technical law. He had hoped tocompile a digest of English law, but found it more than he could doalone, and had laid it aside. The _Instauratio_ had contemplated thegood of men "in the dowries of nature;" the _Laws_, their good "insociety and the dowries of government. " As he owed duty to his country, and could no longer do it service, he meant to do it honour by hishistory of Henry VII. His _Essays_ were but "recreations;" andremembering that all his writings had hitherto "gone all into the Cityand none into the Temple, " he wished to make "some poor oblation, " andtherefore had chosen an argument mixed of religious and civilconsiderations, 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 amongstthe men of our times I hold you in special reverence. "

The question naturally presents itself, in regard to a friend of BishopAndrewes, What was Bacon as regards religion? And the answer, it seemsto me, can admit of no doubt. The obvious and superficial thing to sayis that his religion was but an official one, a tribute to custom andopinion. But it was not so. Both in his philosophical thinking, and inthe feelings of his mind in the various accidents and occasions of life, Bacon was a religious man, with a serious and genuine religion. Hissense of the truth and greatness of religion was as real as his sense ofthe truth and greatness of nature; they were interlaced together, andcould not be separated, though they were to be studied separately andindependently. The call, repeated through all his works from theearliest to the last, _Da Fidel quæ Fidel sunt_, was a warning againstconfusing the two, but was an earnest recognition of the claims of each. The solemn religious words in which his prefaces and general statementsoften wind up with thanksgiving and hope and prayer, are no mere wordsof course; they breathe the spirit of the deepest conviction. It is truethat he takes the religion of Christendom as he finds it. The grounds ofbelief, the relation of faith to reason, the profounder inquiries intothe basis of man's knowledge of the Eternal and Invisible, are out ofthe circle within which he works. What we now call the philosophy ofreligion is absent from his writings. In truth, his mind was notqualified to grapple with such questions. There is no sign in hiswritings that he ever tried his strength against them; that he evercared to go below the surface into the hidden things of mind, and whatmind deals with above and beyond sense--those metaphysical difficultiesand depths, as we call them, which there is no escaping, and which areas hard to explore and as dangerous to mistake as the forces andcombinations of external nature. But it does not follow, because he hadnot asked all the questions that others have asked, that he had notthought out his reasonable faith. His religion was not one of mere vaguesentiment: it was the result of reflection and deliberate judgment. Itwas the discriminating and intelligent Church of England religion ofHooker and Andrewes, which had gone back to something deeper and noblerin Christianity than the popular Calvinism of the earlier Reformation;and though sternly hostile to the system of the Papacy, both onreligious and political grounds, attempted to judge it with knowledgeand justice. This deliberate character of his belief is shown in theremarkable Confession of Faith which he left behind him: aclosely-reasoned and nobly-expressed survey of Christian theology--"a_summa theologiæ_, digested into seven pages of the finest English ofthe days when its tones were finest. " "The entire scheme of Christiantheology, " as Mr. Spedding says, "is constantly in his thoughts;underlies everything; defines for him the limits of human speculation;and, as often as the course of inquiry touches at any point the boundaryline, never fails to present itself. There is hardly any occasion or anykind of argument into which it does not at one time or anotherincidentally introduce itself. " Doubtless it was a religion which in himwas compatible, as it has been in others, with grave faults oftemperament and character. But it is impossible to doubt that it washonest, that it elevated his thoughts, that it was a refuge and stay inthe times of trouble. 

CHAPTER VIII. 

BACON'S PHILOSOPHY. 

Bacon was one of those men to whom posterity forgives a great deal forthe greatness of what he has done and attempted for posterity. It isidle, unless all honest judgment is foregone, to disguise the manydeplorable shortcomings of his life; it is unjust to have one measurefor him, and another for those about him and opposed to him. But it isnot 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 yetseen of the student of nature, the enthusiast for knowledge. That such aman was tempted and fell, and suffered the Nemesis of his fall, is aninstance of the awful truth embodied in the tragedy of _Faust_. But hisgenuine devotion, so unwearied and so paramount, to a great idea and agreat purpose for the good of all generations to come, must shield himfrom the insult of Pope's famous and shallow epigram. Whatever may havebeen his sins, and they were many, he cannot have been the "meanest ofmankind, " who lived and died, holding unaltered, amid temptations andfalls, so noble a conception of the use and calling of his life: theduty and service of helping his brethren to know as they had never yetlearned to know. That thought never left him; the obligations it imposedwere never forgotten in the crush and heat of business; the toils, thankless at the time, which it heaped upon him in addition to theburdens of public life were never refused. Nothing diverted him, nothingmade him despair. He was not discouraged because he was not understood. There never was any one in whose life the "_Souveraineté du but_" wasmore certain and more apparent; and that object was the second greatestthat man can have. To teach men to know is only next to making themgood. 

The Baconian philosophy, the reforms of the _Novum Organum_, the methodof experiment and induction, are commonplaces, and sometimes lead to amisconception of what Bacon did. Bacon is, and is not, the founder ofmodern science. What Bacon believed could be done, what he hoped anddivined, for the correction and development of human knowledge, was onething; what his methods were, and how far they were successful, isanother. It would hardly be untrue to say that though Bacon is theparent of modern science, his methods contributed nothing to its actualdiscoveries; neither by possibility could they have done so. The greatand wonderful work which the world owes to him was in the idea, and notin the execution. The idea was that the systematic and wide examinationof facts was the first thing to be done in science, and that till thishad been done faithfully and impartially, with all the appliances andall the safeguards that experience and forethought could suggest, allgeneralisations, all anticipations from mere reasoning, must beadjourned and postponed; and further, that sought on these conditions, knowledge, certain and fruitful, beyond all that men then imagined, could be attained. His was the faith of the discoverer, the imaginationof the poet, the voice of the prophet. But his was not the warrior'sarm, the engineer's skill, the architect's creativeness. "I only soundthe clarion, " he says, "but I enter not into the battle;" and with aGreek quotation very rare with him, he compares himself to one ofHomer's peaceful heralds, [Greek: chairete kêrukes, Dios angeloi êde kaiandrôn]. Even he knew not the full greatness of his own enterprise. Heunderrated the vastness and the subtlety of nature. He overrated his ownappliances to bring it under his command. He had not that incommunicablegenius and instinct of the investigator which in such men as Faradayclose hand to hand with phenomena. His weapons and instruments wantedprecision; they were powerful up to a certain point, but they had theclumsiness of an unpractised time. Cowley compared him to Moses onPisgah surveying the promised land; it was but a distant survey, andNewton was the Joshua who began to take possession of it. 

The idea of the great enterprise, in its essential outline, and with afull sense of its originality and importance, was early formed, and waseven sketched on paper with Bacon's characteristic self-reliance when hewas but twenty-five. Looking back, in a letter written in the last yearof his life, on the ardour and constancy with which he had clung to hisfaith--"in that purpose my mind never waxed old; in that long intervalof time it never cooled"--he remarks that it was then "forty years sincehe put together a youthful essay on these matters, which with vastconfidence I called by the high-sounding title, The Greatest Birth ofTime. " "The Greatest Birth of Time, " whatever it was, has perished, though the name, altered to "Partus Temporis _Masculus_" has survived, attached to some fragments of uncertain date and arrangement. But invery truth the child was born, and, as Bacon says, for forty years grewand developed, with many changes yet the same. Bacon was mosttenacious, not only of ideas, but even of the phrases, images, and turnsof speech in which they had once flashed on him and taken shape in hismind. The features of his undertaking remained the same from first tolast, only expanded and enlarged as time went on and experience widened;his conviction that the knowledge of nature, and with it the power tocommand and to employ nature, were within the capacity of mankind andmight be restored to them; the certainty that of this knowledge men hadas yet acquired but the most insignificant part, and that all existingclaims to philosophical truth were as idle and precarious as the guessesand traditions of the vulgar; his belief that no greater object could beaimed at than to sweep away once and for ever all this sham knowledgeand all that supported it, and to lay an entirely new and clearfoundation to build on for the future; his assurance that, as it waseasy to point out with fatal and luminous certainty the rottenness andhollowness of all existing knowledge and philosophy, so it was equallyeasy to devise and practically apply new and natural methods ofinvestigation and construction, which should replace it by knowledge ofinfallible truth and boundless fruitfulness. His object--to gain the keyto the interpretation of nature; his method--to gain it, not by themeans common to all previous schools of philosophy, by untestedreasonings and imposing and high-sounding generalisations, but by aseries and scale of rigorously verified inductions, starting from thelowest facts of experience to discoveries which should prove and realisethemselves by leading deductively to practical results--these, in oneform or another, were the theme of his philosophical writings from theearliest 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 (1590/91), in which he announced that hehad "taken all knowledge for his province, " to "purge it of 'frivolousdisputations' and 'blind experiments, ' and that whatever happened tohim, he meant to be a 'true pioneer in the mine of truth. '" But thefirst public step in the opening of his great design was the publicationin the autumn of 1605 of the _Advancement of Learning_, a careful andbalanced report on the existing stock and deficiencies of humanknowledge. 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 cannotgo it. " But from this image of his purpose, his thoughts greatly widenedas time went on. The _Advancement_, in part at least, was probably ahurried work. It shadowed out, but only shadowed out, the lines of hisproposed reform of philosophical thought; it showed his dissatisfactionwith much that was held to be sound and complete, and showed thedirection of his ideas and hopes. But it was many years before he took afurther step. Active life intervened. In 1620, at the height of hisprosperity, on the eve of his fall, he published the long meditated_Novum Organum_, the avowed challenge to the old philosophies, theengine and instrument of thought and discovery which was to put to shameand supersede all others, containing, in part at least, the principlesof that new method of the use of experience which was to be the key tothe interpretation and command of nature, and, together with the method, an elaborate but incomplete exemplification of its leading processes. Here were summed up, and stated with the most solemn earnestness, theconclusions to which long study and continual familiarity with thematters in question had led him. And with the _Novum Organum_ was atlength disclosed, though only in outline, the whole of the vast schemein all its parts, object, method, materials, results, for the"Instauration" of human knowledge, the restoration of powers lost, disused, neglected, 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_, examples 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 eodem intellectûs usu quem alii in inquirendo et inveniendo adhibere consueverunt_. 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 _sixth_ part can be completed, wherein will be set forth the new philosophy--the results of the application of the new method to all the phenomena of the universe. But to complete this, the last part of the _Instauratio_, Bacon does not hope; he speaks of it as a thing, _et supra vires et ultra spes nostras collocata_. "--_Works_, i. 71. 

The _Novum Organum_, itself imperfect, was the crown of all that helived to do. It was followed (1622) by the publication, intended to beperiodical, of materials for the new philosophy to work upon, particularsections and classes of observations on phenomena--the _History of theWinds_, the _History of Life and Death_. Others were partly prepared butnot published by him. And finally, in 1623, he brought out in Latin agreatly enlarged recasting of the _Advancement_; the nine books of the"_De Augmentis_. " But the great scheme was not completed; portions wereleft more or less finished. Much that he purposed was left undone, andcould not have been yet done at that time. 

But the works which he published represent imperfectly the labour spenton the undertaking. Besides these there remains a vast amount of unusedor rejected work, which shows how it was thought out, rearranged, triedfirst in one fashion and then in another, recast, developed. Separatechapters, introductions, "experimental essays and discarded beginnings, "treatises with picturesque and imaginative titles, succeeded one anotherin that busy work-shop; and these first drafts and tentative essays havein them some of the freshest and most felicitous forms of his thoughts. At one time his enterprise, connecting itself with his own life andmission, rose before his imagination and kindled his feelings, andembodied itself in the lofty and stately "Proem" already quoted. Hisquick and brilliant imagination saw shadows and figures of his ideas inthe ancient mythology, which he worked out with curious ingenuity andoften much poetry in his _Wisdom of the Ancients_. Towards the end ofhis life he began to embody his thoughts and plans in a philosophicaltale, which he did not finish--the _New Atlantis_--a charming example ofhis graceful fancy and of his power of easy and natural story-telling. Between the _Advancement_ and the _Novum Organum_ (1605-20) muchunderground work had been done. "He had finally (about 1607) settled theplan of the _Great Instauration_, and began to call it by that name. "The plan, first in three or four divisions, had been finally digestedinto six. Vague outlines had become definite and clear. Distinctportions had been worked out. Various modes of treatment had been tried, abandoned, modified. Prefaces were written to give the sketch andpurpose of chapters not yet composed. The _Novum Organum_ had beenwritten and rewritten twelve times over. Bacon kept his papers, and wecan trace in the unused portion of those left behind him much of theprogress of his work, and the shapes which much of it went through. The_Advancement_ itself is the filling-out and perfecting of what is foundin germ, meagre and rudimentary, in a _Discourse in Praise ofKnowledge_, written in the days of Elizabeth, and in some Latin chaptersof an early date, the _Cogitationes de Scientia Humana_, on the limitsand use of knowledge, and on the relation of natural history to naturalphilosophy. These early essays, with much of the same characteristicillustration, and many of the favourite images and maxims and texts andphrases, which continue to appear in his writings to the end, containthe thoughts of a man long accustomed to meditate and to see his way onthe new aspects of knowledge opening upon him. And before the_Advancement_ he had already tried his hand on a work intended to be intwo books, which Mr. Ellis describes as a "great work on theInterpretation of Nature, " the "earliest type of the _Instauratio_, " andwhich Bacon called by the enigmatical name of _Valerius Terminus_. Init, as in a second draft, which in its turn was superseded by the_Advancement_, the line of thought of the Latin _Cogitationes_reappears, expanded and more carefully ordered; it contains also thefirst sketch of his certain and infallible method for what he calls the"freeing of the direction" in the search after Truth, and the firstindications of the four classes of "Idols" which were to be so memorablea portion of Bacon's teaching. And between the _Advancement_ and the_Novum Organum_ at least one unpublished treatise of great interestintervened, the _Visa et Cogitata_, on which he was long employed, andwhich he brought to a finished shape, fit to be submitted to his friendsand critics, Sir Thomas Bodley and Bishop Andrewes. It is spoken of asa book to be "imparted _sicut videbitur_, " in the review which he madeof his life and objects soon after he was made Solicitor in 1608. Anumber of fragments also bear witness to the fierce scorn and wrathwhich possessed him against the older and the received philosophies. Hetried his hand at declamatory onslaughts on the leaders of human wisdom, from the early Greeks and Aristotle down to the latest "novellists;" andhe certainly succeeded in being magnificently abusive. But he thoughtwisely that this was not the best way of doing what in the _CommentariusSolutus_ he calls on himself to do--"taking a greater confidence andauthority in discourses of this nature, _tanquam sui certus et de altodespiciens_;" and the rhetorical _Redargutio Philosophiarum_ andwritings of kindred nature were laid aside by his more serious judgment. But all these fragments witness to the immense and unwearied labourbestowed in the midst of a busy life on his undertaking; they suggest, too, the suspicion that there was much waste from interruption, and thedoubt whether his work would not have been better if it could have beenmore steadily continuous. But if ever a man had a great object in life, and pursued it through good and evil report, through ardent hope andkeen disappointment, to the end, with unwearied patience and unshakenfaith, 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 theleast part of the pathetic fortune of his life that his own success wasso imperfect. 

When a reader first comes from the vague, popular notions of Bacon'swork to his definite proposals the effect is startling. Every one hasheard that he contemplated a complete reform of the existing conceptionsof human knowledge, and of the methods by which knowledge was to besought; that rejecting them as vitiated, by the loose and untested wayin which they had been formed, he called men from verbal generalisationsand unproved assumptions to come down face to face with the realities ofexperience; that he substituted for formal reasoning, from baselesspremises and unmeaning principles, a methodical system of cautious andsifting inference from wide observation and experiment; and that he thusopened the path which modern science thenceforth followed, with itsamazing and unexhausted discoveries, and its vast and beneficentpractical results. We credit all this to Bacon, and assuredly notwithout reason. All this is what was embraced in his vision of a changedworld of thought and achievement. All this is what was meant by that_Regnum Hominis_, which, with a play on sacred words which his age didnot shrink from, and which he especially pleased himself with, markedthe coming of that hitherto unimagined empire of man over the powers andforces which encompassed him. But the detail of all this is multifariousand complicated, and is not always what we expect; and when we come tosee how his work is estimated by those who, by greatest familiarity withscientific ideas and the history of scientific inquiries, are bestfitted to judge of it, many a surprise awaits us. 

For we find that the greatest differences of opinion exist on the valueof what he did. Not only very unfavourable judgments have been passedupon it, on general grounds--as an irreligious, or a shallow andone-sided, or a poor and "utilitarian" philosophy, and on a definitecomparison of it with the actual methods and processes which as a matterof history have been the real means of scientific discovery--but alsosome of those who have most admired his genius, and with the deepestlove and reverence have spared no pains to do it full justice, have yetcome to the conclusion that as an instrument and real method of workBacon's attempt was a failure. It is not only De Maistre and LordMacaulay who dispute his philosophical eminence. It is not only thedepreciating opinion of a contemporary like Harvey, who was actuallydoing what Bacon was writing about. It is not only that men who afterthe long history of modern science have won their place among itsleaders, and are familiar by daily experience with the ways in which itworks--a chemist like Liebig, a physiologist like Claude Bernard--saythat they can find nothing to help them in Bacon's methods. It is notonly that a clear and exact critic like M. De Rémusat looks at hisattempt, with its success and failure, as characteristic of English, massive, practical good sense rather than as marked by realphilosophical depth and refinement, such as Continental thinkers pointto and are proud of in Descartes and Leibnitz. It is not even that acompetent master of the whole domain of knowledge, Whewell, filled withthe deepest sense of all that the world owes to Bacon, takes for grantedthat "though Bacon's general maxims are sagacious and animating, hisparticular precepts failed in his hands, and are now practicallyuseless;" and assuming that Bacon's method is not the right one, and notcomplete as far as the progress of science up to his time could directit, proceeds to construct a _Novum Organum Renovatum_. But Bacon'swritings have recently undergone the closest examination by two editors, whose care for his memory is as loyal and affectionate as their capacityis undoubted, and their willingness to take trouble boundless. And Mr. Ellis and Mr. Spedding, with all their interest in every detail ofBacon's work, and admiration of the way in which he performed it, makeno secret of their conclusion that he failed in the very thing on whichhe was most bent--the discovery of practical and fruitful ways ofscientific inquiry. "Bacon, " says Mr. Spedding, "failed to devise apracticable method for the discovery of the Forms of Nature, because hemisconceived the conditions of the case. .. . For the same reason hefailed to make any single discovery which holds its place as one of thesteps by which science has in any direction really advanced. The clewwith which he entered the labyrinth did not reach far enough; before hehad nearly attained his end he was obliged either to come back or to goon without it. "

 "His peculiar system of philosophy, " says Mr. Spedding in another preface, "that is to say, the peculiar method of investigation, the "_organum_, " the "_formula_, " the "_clavis_, " the "_ars ipsa interpretandi naturam_, " the "_filum 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 command over the powers of nature--_of this philosophy we 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 machinery, very subtle, elaborate, and ingenious, but not worth constructing, because all the work it could do may be done more easily another way. "--_Works_, iii. 171. 

What his method really was is itself a matter of question. Mr. Ellisspeaks of it as a matter "but imperfectly apprehended. " He differs fromhis fellow-labourer Mr. Spedding, in what he supposes to be its centraland characteristic innovation. Mr. Ellis finds it in an improvement andperfection of logical machinery. Mr. Spedding finds it in the formationof a great "natural and experimental history, " a vast collection offacts in every department of nature, which was to be a more importantpart of his philosophy than the _Novum Organum_ itself. Both of themthink 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 isno didactic exposition of his method in the whole of his writings, " andthat "this has not been sufficiently remarked by those who have spokenof his philosophy. "

In the first place, the kind of intellectual instrument which heproposed to construct was a mistake. His great object was to place thehuman mind "on a level with things and nature" (_ut faciamus intellectumhumanum rebus et naturæ parem_), and this could only be done by arevolution in methods. The ancients had all that genius could do forman; but it was a matter, he said, not of the strength and fleetness ofthe running, but of the rightness of the way. It was a new method, absolutely different from anything known, which he proposed to theworld, and which should lead men to knowledge, with the certainty andwith the impartial facility of a high-road. The Induction which heimagined to himself as the contrast to all that had yet been tried wasto have two qualities. It was to end, by no very prolonged or difficultprocesses, in absolute certainty. And next, it was to leave very littleto the differences of intellectual power: it was to level minds andcapacities. It was to give all men the same sort of power which a pairof compasses gives the hand in drawing a circle. "_Absolute certainty, and a mechanical mode of procedure_" says Mr. Ellis, "_such that all menshould be capable of employing it, are the two great features of theBaconian system_. " This he thought possible, and this he set himself toexpound--"a method universally applicable, and in all cases infallible. "In this he saw the novelty and the vast importance of his discovery. "Bythis method all the knowledge which the human mind was capable ofreceiving might be attained, and attained without unnecessary labour. "It was a method of "a demonstrative character, with the power ofreducing all minds to nearly the same level. " The conception, indeed, ofa "great Art of knowledge, " of an "Instauration" of the sciences, of a"Clavis" which should unlock the difficulties which had hindereddiscovery, was not a new one. This attempt at a method which should becertain, which should level capacities, which should do its work in ashort time, had a special attraction for the imagination of the wildspirits of the South, from Raimond Lulli in the thirteenth century tothe audacious Calabrians of the sixteenth. With Bacon it was somethingmuch more serious and reasonable and business-like. But such a claim hasnever yet been verified; there is no reason to think that it ever canbe; and to have made it shows a fundamental defect in Bacon's conceptionof 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 doctrineof Induction was one of those novelties which are so obvious after theevent, though so strange before it, and was undoubtedly the element inhis system which gave it life and power and influence on the course ofhuman thought and discovery, his account of Induction was far fromcomplete and satisfactory. Without troubling himself about the theory ofInduction, as De Rémusat has pointed out, he contented himself withapplying to its use the precepts of common-sense and a sagaciousperception of the circumstances in which it was to be employed. But eventhese precepts, notable as they were, wanted distinctness, and thequalities needed for working rules. The change is great when in fiftyyears we pass from the poetical science of Bacon to the mathematical andprecise science of Newton. His own time may well have been struck bythe originality and comprehensiveness of such a discriminatingarrangement of proofs as the "Prerogative Instances" of the _NovumOrganum_, so natural and real, yet never before thus compared andsystematized. But there is a great interval between his method ofexperimenting, his "_Hunt of Pan_"--the three tables of Instances, "_Presence_, " "_Absence_" and "_Degrees, or Comparisons_, " leading to aprocess of sifting and exclusion, and to the _First Vintage_, orbeginnings of theory--and say, for instance, Mill's four methods ofexperimental inquiry: the method of _agreement_, of _differences_, of_residues_, and of _concomitant variations_. The course which he markedout so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to follow was onewhich was found to be impracticable, and as barren of results as thosedeductive philosophies on which he lavished his scorn. He has leftprecepts and examples of what he meant by his cross-examining andsifting processes. As admonitions to cross-examine and to sift facts andphenomena they are valuable. Many of the observations andclassifications are subtle and instructive. But in his hands nothingcomes of them. They lead at the utmost to mere negative conclusions;they show what a thing is not. But his attempt to elicit anythingpositive out of them breaks down, or ends at best in divinations andguesses, sometimes--as in connecting Heat and Motion--very near to laterand more carefully-grounded theories, but always unverified. He had aradically false and mechanical conception, though in words he earnestlydisclaims it, of the way to deal with the facts of nature. He looked onthem as things which told their own story, and suggested the questionswhich ought to be put to them; and with this idea half his time wasspent in collecting huge masses of indigested facts of the most variousauthenticity and value, and he thought he was collecting materialswhich his method had only to touch in order to bring forth from themlight and truth and power. He thought that, not in certain sciences, butin all, one set of men could do the observing and collecting, andanother be set on the work of Induction and the discovery of "axioms. "Doubtless in the arrangement and sorting of them his versatile andingenious mind gave itself full play; he divides and distinguishes theminto their companies and groups, different kinds of Motion, "Prerogative" instances, with their long tale of imaginative titles. Butwe look in vain for any use that he was able to make of them, or even tosuggest. Bacon never adequately realised that no promiscuous assemblageof even the most certain facts could ever lead to knowledge, could eversuggest their own interpretation, without the action on them of theliving mind, without the initiative of an idea. In truth he was soafraid of assumptions and "anticipations" and prejudices--his greatbugbear was so much the "_intellectus sibi permissus_" the mind givenliberty to guess and imagine and theorise, instead of, as it ought, absolutely and servilely submitting itself to the control of facts--thathe missed the true place of the rational and formative element in hisaccount of Induction. He does tell us, indeed, that "truth emergessooner from error than from confusion. " He indulges the mind, in thecourse of its investigation of "Instances, " with a first "vintage" ofprovisional generalisations. But of the way in which the living mind ofthe discoverer works, with its ideas and insight, and thoughts that comeno one knows whence, working hand in hand with what comes before the eyeor is tested by the instrument, he gives us no picture. Compare hiselaborate investigation of the "Form of Heat" in the _Novum Organum_, with such a record of real inquiry as Wells's _Treatise on Dew_, orHerschel's analysis of it in his _Introduction to Natural Philosophy_. And of the difference of genius between a Faraday or a Newton, and thecrowd of average men who have used and finished off their work, he takesno account. Indeed, he thinks that for the future such difference is todisappear. 

 "That his method is impracticable, " says 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 observation 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 _naturæ_ 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 introduced. "--Ellis, _General Preface_, i. 38. 

Lastly, not only was Bacon's conception of philosophy so narrow as toexclude one of its greatest domains; for, says Mr. Ellis, "it cannot bedenied that to Bacon all sound philosophy seemed to be included in whatwe now call the natural sciences, " and in all its parts was claimed asthe subject of his inductive method; but Bacon's scientific knowledgeand scientific conceptions were often very imperfect--more imperfectthan 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 ofsuccess--the knowledge of the heavens--he speaks with a coldness andsuspicion which contrasts remarkably with his eagerness about thingsbelonging to the sphere of the earth and within reach of the senses. Heholds, of course, the unity of the world; the laws of the whole visibleuniverse 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 hisastronomical theories; he expounded them in his "_Descriptio GlobiIntellectualis_" and his _Thema Coeli_ He was not altogether ignorant ofwhat was going on in days when Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo were atwork. But he did not know how to deal with it, and there were men inEngland, before and then, who understood much better than he theproblems and the methods of astronomy. He had one conspicuous andstrange defect for a man who undertook what he did. He was not amathematician: he did not see the indispensable necessity of mathematicsin the great _Instauration_ which he projected; he did not much believein what they could do. He cared so little about them that he takes nonotice of Napier's invention of Logarithms. He was not able to trace howthe direct information of the senses might be rightly subordinated tothe rational, but not self-evident results of geometry and arithmetic. He was impatient of the subtleties of astronomical calculations; theyonly attempted to satisfy problems about the motion of bodies in thesky, and told us nothing of physical fact; they gave us, as Prometheusgave to Jove, the outside skin of the offering, which was stuffed insidewith straw and rubbish. He entirely failed to see that before dealingwith physical astronomy, it must be dealt with mathematically. "It iswell to remark, " as Mr. Ellis says, "that none of Newton's astronomicaldiscoveries could have been made if astronomers had not continued torender themselves liable to Bacon's censure. " Bacon little thought thatin navigation the compass itself would become a subordinate instrumentcompared with the helps given by mathematical astronomy. In this, and inother ways, Bacon rose above his time in his conceptions of what _mightbe_, 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 wasill-informed about the advances of knowledge in his own time. And hismind was often not clear when he came to deal with complex phenomena. Thus, though he constructed a table of specific gravities--"the onlycollection, " says Mr. Ellis, "of quantitative experiments that we findin his works, " and "wonderfully accurate considering the manner in whichthey were obtained;" yet he failed to understand the real nature of thefamous experiment of Archimedes. And so with the larger features of histeaching it is impossible not to feel how imperfectly he had emancipatedhimself from the power of words and of common prepossessions; how forone reason or another he had failed to call himself to account in theterms he employed, and the assumptions on which he argued. The cautiondoes not seem to have occurred to him that the statement of a fact may, in nine cases out of ten, involve a theory. His whole doctrine of"Forms" and "Simple natures, " which is so prominent in his method ofinvestigation, is an example of loose and slovenly use of unexamined anduntested ideas. He allowed himself to think that it would be possible toarrive at an alphabet of nature, which, once attained, would suffice tospell out and constitute all its infinite combinations. He accepted, without thinking it worth a doubt, the doctrine of appetites andpassions and inclinations and dislikes and horrors in inorganic nature. His whole physiology of life and death depends on a doctrine of animalspirits, of which he traces the operations and qualities as if they wereas certain as the nerves or the blood, and of which he gives thisaccount--"that in every tangible body there is a spirit covered andenveloped in the grosser body;" "not a virtue, not an energy, not anactuality, nor any such idle matter, but a body thin and invisible, andyet having place and dimension, and real. " . .. "a middle nature betweenflame, which is momentary, and air which is permanent. " Yet these arethe very things for which he holds up Aristotle and the Scholastics andthe Italian speculators to reprobation and scorn. The clearness of histhinking was often overlaid by the immense profusion of decorativematerial which his meditation brought along with it. The defect wasgreater than that which even his ablest defenders admit. It was morethan that in that "greatest and radical difference, which he himselfobserves" between minds, the difference between minds which were apt tonote _distinctions_, and those which were apt to note _likenesses_, hewas, without knowing it, defective in the first. It was that in manyinstances he exemplified in his own work the very faults which hecharged on the older philosophies: haste, carelessness, precipitancy, using words without thinking them out, assuming to know when he ought tohave perceived his real ignorance. 

What, then, with all these mistakes and failures, not always creditableor pardonable, has given Bacon his preeminent place in the history ofscience?

1. The answer is that with all his mistakes and failures, the principleson which his mode of attaining a knowledge of nature was based were theonly true ones; and they had never before been propounded sosystematically, so fully, and so earnestly. His was not the first mindon whom these principles had broken. Men were, and had been for sometime, pursuing their inquiries into various departments of natureprecisely on the general plan of careful and honest observation of realthings which he enjoined. They had seen, as he saw, the futility of allattempts at natural philosophy by mere thinking and arguing, withoutcoming into contact with the contradictions or corrections orverifications of experience. In Italy, in Germany, in England there werelaborious and successful workers, who had long felt that to be in touchwith nature was the only way to know. But no one had yet come before theworld to proclaim this on the house-tops, as the key of the only certainpath to the secrets of nature, the watchword of a revolution in themethods of interpreting her; and this Bacon did with an imposingauthority and power which enforced attention. He spoke the thoughts ofpatient toilers like Harvey with a largeness and richness which theycould not command, and which they perhaps smiled at. He disentangled andspoke the vague thoughts of his age, which other men had not the courageand clearness of mind to formulate. What Bacon _did_, indeed, and whathe _meant_, are separate matters. He _meant_ an infallible method bywhich man should be fully equipped for a struggle with nature; he meantan irresistible and immediate conquest, within a definite and notdistant time. It was too much. He himself saw no more of what he _meant_than Columbus did of America. But what he _did_ was to persuade men forthe future that the intelligent, patient, persevering cross-examinationof things, and the thoughts about them, was the only, and was thesuccessful road to know. No one had yet done this, and he did it. Hiswritings were a public recognition of real science, in its humblesttasks about the commonplace facts before our feet, as well as in itsloftiest achievements. "The man who is growing great and happy byelectrifying a bottle, " says Dr. Johnson, "wonders to see the worldengaged in the prattle about peace and war, " and the world was ready tosmile at the simplicity or the impertinence of his enthusiasm. Baconimpressed upon the world for good, with every resource of subtleobservation and forcible statement, that "the man who is growing greatby electrifying a bottle" is as important a person in the world'saffairs as the arbiter of peace and war. 

2. Yet this is not all. An inferior man might have made himself themouthpiece of the hopes and aspirations of his generation after a largerscience. But to Bacon these aspirations embodied themselves in the formof a great and absorbing idea; an idea which took possession of thewhole man, kindling in him a faith which nothing could quench, and apassion which nothing could dull; an idea which, for forty years, washis daily companion, his daily delight, his daily business; an ideawhich he was never tired of placing in ever fresh and more attractivelights, from which no trouble could wean him, about which no disastercould make him despair; an idea round which the instincts and intuitionsand obstinate convictions of genius gathered, which kindled his richimagination and was invested by it with a splendour and magnificencelike the dreams of fable. It is this idea which finds its fittingexpression in the grand and stately aphorisms of the _Novum Organum_, inthe varied fields of interest in the _De Augmentis_, in the romance ofthe _New Atlantis_. It is this idea, this certainty of a new unexploredKingdom of Knowledge within the reach and grasp of man, if he will behumble enough and patient enough and truthful enough to occupy it--thisannouncement not only of a new system of thought, but of a change in thecondition of the world--a prize and possession such as man had not yetimagined; 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 andmen's minds cannot easily be conceived or imagined, " yet more thanverified in the wonders which our eyes have seen--it is this which givesits prerogative to Bacon's work. That he bungled about the processes ofInduction, that he talked about an unintelligible doctrine of _Forms_, did not affect the weight and solemnity of his call to learn, so full ofwisdom and good-sense, so sober and so solid, yet so audaciouslyconfident. There had been nothing like it in its ardour of hope, in theglory which it threw around the investigation of nature. It was thepresence and the power of a great idea--long become a commonplace to us, but strange and perplexing at first to his own generation, whichprobably shared Coke's opinion that it qualified its champion for aplace in the company of the "Ship of Fools, " which expressed its opinionof the man who wrote the _Novum Organum_, in the sentiment that "a fool_could_ not have written it, and a wise man _would_ not"--it is thiswhich has placed Bacon among the great discoverers of the human race. 

It is this imaginative yet serious assertion of the vast range andpossibilities of human knowledge which, as M. De Rémusat remarks--thekeenest and fairest of Bacon's judges--gives Bacon his claim to theundefinable but very real character of greatness. Two men stand out, "the masters of those who know, " without equals up to their time, amongmen--the Greek Aristotle and the Englishman Bacon. They agree in theuniversality and comprehensiveness of their conception of humanknowledge; and they were absolutely alone in their serious practicalambition to work out this conception. In the separate departments ofthought, of investigation, of art, each is left far behind by numbers ofmen, 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 afterhim, ventured on the daring enterprise of "taking all knowledge fortheir province;" and in this they stood alone. This present scene ofman's existence, this that we call nature, the stage on which mortallife begins and goes on and ends, the faculties with which man isequipped to act, to enjoy, to create, to hold his way amid or againstthe 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 atheory or a system that they look around them on the place where theyfind themselves with life and thought and power; that were easily done, and has been done over and over again, only to prove its futility. It isto know, as to the whole and its parts, as men understand _knowing_ insome one subject of successful handling, whether art or science orpractical craft. This idea, this effort, distinguishes these two men. The Greeks--predecessors, contemporaries, successors of Aristotle--werespeculators, full of clever and ingenious guesses, in which the amountof clear and certain fact was in lamentable disproportion to the schemesblown up from it; or they devoted themselves more profitably to some oneor two subjects of inquiry, moral or purely intellectual, with absoluteindifference to what might be asked, or what might be known, of the realconditions under which they were passing their existence. Some of theRomans, Cicero and Pliny, had encyclopædic minds; but the Roman mindwas the slave of precedent, and was more than satisfied with partiallyunderstanding and neatly arranging what the Greeks had left. TheArabians looked more widely about them; but the Arabians wereessentially sceptics, and resigned subjects to the inevitable and theinexplicable; there was an irony, open or covert, in their philosophy, their terminology, their transcendental mysticism, which showed howlittle they believed that they really knew. The vast and mightyintellects of the schoolmen never came into a real grapple with theimmensity of the facts of the natural or even of the moral world; withinthe world of abstract thought, the world of language, with its infinitegrowths and consequences, they have never had their match for keenness, for patience, for courage, for inexhaustible toil; but they were as muchdisconnected from the natural world, which was their stage of life, asif they had been disembodied spirits. The Renaissance brought with itnot only the desire to know, but to know comprehensively and in allpossible directions; it brought with it temptations to the awakenedItalian genius, renewed, enlarged, refined, if not strengthened by itspassage through the Middle Ages, to make thought deal with the real, andto understand the scene in which men were doing such strange andwonderful things; but Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, and theirfellows, were not men capable of more than short flights, though theymight be daring and eager ones. It required more thoroughness, morehumble-minded industry, to match the magnitude of the task. And therehave been men of universal minds and comprehensive knowledge sinceBacon, Leibnitz, Goethe, Humboldt, men whose thoughts were at homeeverywhere, where there was something to be known. But even for them theworld of knowledge has grown too large. We shall never again see anAristotle or a Bacon, because the conditions of knowledge have altered. Bacon, like Aristotle, belonged to an age of adventure, which went tosea little knowing whither it went, and ill furnished with knowledge andinstruments. He entered with a vast and vague scheme of discovery onthese unknown seas and new worlds which to us are familiar, and dailytraversed in every direction. This new world of knowledge has turned outin many ways very different from what Aristotle or Bacon supposed, andhas been conquered by implements and weapons very different in precisionand power from what they purposed to rely on. But the combination ofpatient and careful industry, with the courage and divination of genius, in doing what none had done before, makes it equally stupid and idle toimpeach their greatness. 

3. Bacon has been charged with bringing philosophy down from theheights, not as of old to make men know themselves, and to be theteacher of the highest form of truth, but to be the purveyor of materialutility. It contemplates only, it is said, the "_commoda vitæ_;" aboutthe deeper and more elevating problems of thought it does not troubleitself. It concerns itself only about external and sensible nature, about what is "of the earth, earthy. " But when it comes to the questionswhich have attracted the keenest and hardiest thinkers, the question, what it is that thinks and wills--what is the origin and guarantee ofthe faculties by which men know anything at all and form rational andtrue conceptions about nature and themselves, whence it is that reasondraws its powers and materials and rules--what is the meaning of wordswhich 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 aloose and superficial treatment of them. Bacon certainly was not ametaphysician, nor an exact and lucid reasoner. With wonderful flashesof sure intuition or happy anticipation, his mind was deficient in thepowers which deal with the deeper problems of thought, just as it wasdeficient in the mathematical faculty. The subtlety, the intuition, thepenetration, the severe precision, even the force of imagination, whichmake a man a great thinker on any abstract subject were not his; theinterest of questions which had interested metaphysicians had nointerest for him: he distrusted and undervalued them. When he touchesthe "ultimities" of knowledge he is as obscure and hard to be understoodas any of those restless Southern Italians of his own age, who sharedwith him the ambition of reconstructing science. Certainly the sciencewhich 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 pursuedin different ways, in different tempers, with different objects. It maybe followed in the spirit of Newton, of Boyle, of Herschel, of Faraday;or with a confined and low horizon it may be dwarfed and shrivelled intoa mean utilitarianism. But Bacon's horizon was not a narrow one. Hebelieved in God and immortality and the Christian creed and hope. To himthe restoration of the Reign of Man was a noble enterprise, because manwas so great and belonged to so great an order of things, because thethings which he was bid to search into with honesty and truthfulnesswere the works and laws of God, because it was so shameful and somiserable that from an ignorance which industry and good-sense couldremedy, the tribes of mankind passed their days in self-imposed darknessand helplessness. It was God's appointment that men should go throughthis earthly stage of their being. Each stage of man's mysteriousexistence had to be dealt with, not according to his own fancies, butaccording to the conditions imposed on it; and it was one of man's firstduties to arrange for his stay on earth according to the real laws whichhe could find out if he only sought for them. Doubtless it was one ofBacon's highest hopes that from the growth of true knowledge wouldfollow in surprising ways the relief of man's estate; this, as an end, runs through all his yearning after a fuller and surer method ofinterpreting nature. The desire to be a great benefactor, the spirit ofsympathy and pity for mankind, reign through this portion of hiswork--pity for confidence so greatly abused by the teachers of man, pityfor ignorance which might be dispelled, pity for pain and misery whichmight be relieved. In the quaint but beautiful picture of courtesy, kindness, and wisdom, which he imagines in the _New Atlantis_, therepresentative of true philosophy, the "Father of Solomon's House, " isintroduced as one who "had an aspect as if he pitied men. " But unless itis utilitarianism to be keenly alive to the needs and pains of life, andto be eager and busy to lighten and assuage them, Bacon's philosophy wasnot utilitarian. It may deserve many reproaches, but not this one. Sucha passage as the following--in which are combined the highest motivesand graces and passions of the soul, love of truth, humility of mind, purity of purpose, reverence for God, sympathy for man, compassion forthe sorrows of the world and longing to heal them, depth of convictionand 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 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 license having, I suppose, become wearisome), the sciences are confined 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 Cæsar'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 first 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 own image on the creatures and works of God, instead of carefully examining 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 experience captive, and triumphed over the works of God; and to approach 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 is that sound and language which "went forth into all lands, " and did not incur the confusion of Babel; this should men study to be perfect 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 Naturalis_: translated, _Works_, v. 132-3. 

CHAPTER IX. 

BACON AS A WRITER. 

Bacon's name belongs to letters as well as to philosophy. In his ownday, whatever his contemporaries thought of his _Instauration ofKnowledge_, he was in the first rank as a speaker and a writer. SirWalter Raleigh, contrasting him with Salisbury, who could speak but notwrite, and Northampton, who could write but not speak, thought Baconeminent both as a speaker and a writer. Ben Jonson, passing in reviewthe more famous names of his own and the preceding age, from Sir ThomasMore to Sir Philip Sidney, Hooker, Essex, and Raleigh, places Baconwithout a rival at the head of the company as the man who had "fulfilledall numbers, " and "stood as the mark and [Greek: akmê] of our language. "And he also records Bacon's power as a speaker. "No man, " he says, "everspoke more neatly, more pressly, or suffered less emptiness, lessidleness, in what he uttered. ". .. "His hearers could not cough or lookaside from him without loss. He commanded when he spoke, and had hisjudges angry and pleased at his devotion . .. The fear of every man thatheard him was that he should make an end. " He notices one feature forwhich we are less prepared, though we know that the edge of Bacon'ssarcastic tongue was felt and resented in James's Court. "His speech, "says Ben Jonson, "was nobly censorious when he could _spare and pass bya jest_. " The unpopularity which certainly seems to have gathered roundhis name may have had something to do with this reputation. 

Yet as an English writer Bacon did not expect to be remembered, and hehardly cared to be. He wrote much in Latin, and his first care was tohave his books put into a Latin dress. "For these modern languages, " hewrote to Toby Matthews towards the close of his life, "will at one timeor another play the bank-rowte with books, and since I have lost muchtime with this age, I would be glad if God would give me leave torecover it with posterity. " He wanted to be read by the learned out ofEngland, who were supposed to appreciate his philosophical ideas betterthan his own countrymen, and the only way to this was to have his bookstranslated into the "general language. " He sends Prince Charles the_Advancement_ in its new Latin dress. "It is a book, " he says, "thatwill live, and be a citizen of the world, as English books are not. " Andhe fitted it for continental reading by carefully weeding it of allpassages that might give offence to the censors at Rome or Paris. "Ihave been, " he writes to the King, "mine own _Index Expurgatorius_, thatit may be read in all places. For since my end of putting it in Latinwas to have it read everywhere, it had been an absurd contradiction tofree it in the language and to pen it up in the matter. " Even the_Essays_ and the _History of Henry VII. _ he had put into Latin "by somegood pens that do not forsake me. " Among these translators are said tohave been George Herbert and Hobbes, and on more doubtful authority, BenJonson and Selden. The _Essays_ were also translated into Latin andItalian with Bacon's sanction. 

Bacon's contemptuous and hopeless estimate of "these modern languages, "forty years after Spenser had proclaimed and justified his faith in hisown language, is only one of the proofs of the short-sightedness of thewisest and the limitations of the largest-minded. Perhaps we ought notto wonder at his silence about Shakespeare. It was the fashion, exceptamong a set of clever but not always very reputable people, to think thestage, as it was, below the notice of scholars and statesmen; andShakespeare took no trouble to save his works from neglect. Yet it is acurious defect in Bacon that he should not have been more alive to thepowers and future of his own language. He early and all along wasprofoundly impressed with the contrast, which the scholarship of the ageso abundantly presented, of words to things. He dwells in the_Advancement_ on that "first distemper of learning, when men study wordsand not matter. " He illustrates it at large from the reaction of the newlearning and of the popular teaching of the Reformation against theutilitarian and unclassical terminology of the schoolmen; a reactionwhich soon grew to excess, and made men "hunt more after choiceness ofthe phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and thesweet falling of the clauses, " than after worth of subject, soundness ofargument, "life of invention or depth of judgment. " "I have representedthis, " he says, "in an example of late times, but it hath been and willbe _secundum majus et minus_ in all times;" and he likens this "vanity"to "Pygmalion's frenzy"--"for to fall in love with words which are butthe images of matter, is all one as to fall in love with a picture. " Hewas dissatisfied with the first attempt at translation into Latin of the_Advancement_ by Dr. Playfer of Cambridge, because he "desired not somuch neat and polite, as clear, masculine, and apt expression. " Yet, with this hatred of circumlocution and prettiness, of the cloudyamplifications, and pompous flourishings, and "the flowing and wateryvein, " which the scholars of his time affected, it is strange that heshould not have seen that the new ideas and widening thoughts of whichhe was the herald would want a much more elastic and more freely-workinginstrument than Latin could ever become. It is wonderful indeed what canbe done with Latin. It was long after his day to be the language of theexact sciences. In his _History of the Winds_, which is full of hisirrepressible fancy and picturesqueness, Bacon describes in clear andintelligible 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 arough one, on a language which has "taken its ply" in very differentconditions, and of which the genius is that of indirect and circuitousexpression, "full of majesty and circumstance. " But it never, even inthose days of scholarship, could lend itself to the frankness, thestraightforwardness, the fulness and shades of suggestion andassociation, with which, in handling ideas of subtlety and difficulty, awriter would wish to speak to his reader, and which he could find onlyin his mother tongue. It might have been thought that with Bacon'scontempt of form and ceremony in these matters, his consciousness of thepowers of English in his hands might have led him to anticipate that aflexible and rich and strong language might create a literature, andthat a literature, if worth studying, would be studied in its ownlanguage. But so great a change was beyond even his daring thoughts. Tohim, as to his age, the only safe language was the Latin. For familiaruse English was well enough. But it could not be trusted; "it would playthe bankrupt with books. " And yet Galileo was writing in Italian as wellas in Latin; only within twenty-five years later, Descartes was writing_De la Méthode_, and Pascal was writing in the same French in which hewrote the _Provincial Letters_, his _Nouvelles Expériences touchant leVide_, and the controversial pamphlets which followed it; showing how inthat interval of five-and-twenty years an instrument had been fashionedout of a modern language such as for lucid expression and clearreasoning, Bacon had not yet dreamed of. From Bacon to Pascal is thechange from the old scientific way of writing to the modern; from amodern language, as learned and used in the 16th century, to one learnedin the 17th. 

But the language of the age of Elizabeth was a rich and noble one, andit reached a high point in the hands of Bacon. In his hands it lentitself to many uses, and assumed many forms, and he valued it, notbecause he thought highly of its qualities as a language, but because itenabled him with least trouble "to speak as he would, " in throwing offthe abundant thoughts that rose within his mind, and in going throughthe variety of business which could not be done in Latin. But in all hiswriting it is the matter, the real thing that he wanted to say, whichwas uppermost. He cared how it was said, not for the sake of form orornament, but because the force and clearness of what was said dependedso much on how it was said. Of course, what he wanted to say variedindefinitely with the various occasions of his life. His business maymerely be to write "a device" or panegyric for a pageant in the Queen'shonour, or for the revels of Gray's Inn. But even these trifles are theresult of real thought, and are full of ideas--ideas about the hopes ofknowledge or about the policy of the State; and though, of course, theyhave plenty of the flourishes and quaint absurdities indispensable onsuch occasions, yet the "rhetorical affectation" is in the thing itself, and not in the way it is handled; he had an opportunity of saying someof the things which were to him of deep and perpetual interest, and heused it to say them, as forcibly, as strikingly, as attractively as hecould. His manner of writing depends, not on a style, or a studied oracquired 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 thepower to say what he wanted to say, and exactly as he wanted to say it. No one was so little at the mercy of conventional language or customaryrhetoric, except when he persuaded himself that he had to submit tothose necessities of flattery, which cost him at last so dear. 

The book by which English readers, from his own time to ours, have knownhim best, better than by the originality and the eloquence of the_Advancement_, or than by the political weight and historicalimagination of the _History of Henry VII. _, is the first book which hepublished, the volume of _Essays_. It is an instance of his self-willedbut most skilful use of the freedom and ease which the "modernlanguage, " which he despised, gave him. It is obvious that he might haveexpanded these "Counsels, moral and political, " to the size which suchessays used to swell to after his time. Many people would have thankedhim for doing so; and some have thought it a good book on which to hangtheir own reflections and illustrations. But he saw how much could bedone by leaving the beaten track of set treatise and discourse, andsetting down unceremoniously the observations which he had made, and thereal rules which he had felt to be true, on various practical matterswhich come home to men's "business and bosoms. " He was very fond ofthese moral and political generalisations, both of his own collectingand as found in writers who, he thought, had the right to make them, like the Latins of the Empire and the Italians and Spaniards of theRenaissance. But a mere string of maxims and quotations would have beena poor thing and not new; and he cast what he had to say into connectedwholes. But nothing can be more loose than the structure of the essays. There is no art, no style, almost, except in a few--the politicalones--no order: thoughts are put down and left unsupported, unproved, undeveloped. In the first form of the ten, which composed the firstedition of 1597, they are more like notes of analysis or tables ofcontents; they are austere even to meagreness. But the general charactercontinues in the enlarged and expanded ones of Bacon's later years. Theyare like chapters in Aristotle's Ethics and Rhetoric on virtues andcharacters; only Bacon's takes Aristotle's broad marking lines as drawn, and proceeds with the subtler and more refined observations of a muchlonger and wider experience. But these short papers say what they haveto say without preface, and in literary undress, without a superfluousword, without the joints and bands of structure; they say it in brief, rapid sentences, which come down, sentence after sentence, like thestrokes of a great hammer. No wonder that in their disdainful brevitythey seem rugged and abrupt, "and do not seem to end, but fall. " Butwith their truth and piercingness and delicacy of observation, theirroughness gives a kind of flavour which no elaboration could give. It isnone the less that their wisdom is of a somewhat cynical kind, fullyalive to the slipperiness and self-deceits and faithlessness which arein the world and rather inclined to be amused at them. In some we cansee distinct records of the writer's own experience: one contains thesubstance of a charge delivered to Judge Hutton on his appointment;another of them is a sketch drawn from life of a character which hadcrossed Bacon's path, and in the essay on _Seeming Wise_ we can tracefrom the impatient notes put down in his _Commentarius Solutus_, thepicture of the man who stood in his way, the Attorney-General Hobart. Some of them are memorable oracular utterances not inadequate to thesubject, on _Truth_ or _Death_ or _Unity_. Others reveal an utterincapacity to come near a subject, except as a strange externalphenomena, like the essay on _Love_. There is a distinct tendency inthem to the Italian school of political and moral wisdom, the wisdom ofdistrust and of reliance on indirect and roundabout ways. There is agroup of them, "of _Delays_, " "of _Cunning_, " "of _Wisdom for a Man'sSelf_, " "of _Despatch_, " which show how vigilantly and to what purposehe had watched the treasurers and secretaries and intriguers ofElizabeth's and James's Courts; and there are curious self-revelations, as in the essay on _Friendship_. But there are also currents of betterand larger feeling, such as those which show his own ideal of "_GreatPlace_, " and what he felt of its dangers and duties. And mixed with thefantastic taste and conceits of the time, there is evidence in them ofBacon's keen delight in nature, in the beauty and scents of flowers, inthe charm of open-air life, as in the essay on _Gardens_, "The purest ofhuman pleasures, the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man. "

But he had another manner of writing for what he held to be his moreserious work. In the philosophical and historical works there is no wantof attention to the flow and order and ornament of composition. When wecome to the _Advancement of Learning_, we come to a book which is one ofthe landmarks of what high thought and rich imagination have made ofthe English language. It is the first great book in English prose ofsecular interest; the first book which can claim a place beside the_Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity_. As regards its subject-matter, it hasbeen partly thrown into the shade by the greatly enlarged and elaborateform in which it ultimately appeared, in a Latin dress, as the firstportion of the scheme of the _Instauratio_, the _De AugmentisScientiarum_. Bacon looked on it as a first effort, a kind of call-bellto awaken and attract the interest of others in the thoughts and hopeswhich 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, who, according to his frequent illustration, sees more of it than thegamesters 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 greathope, and all that he has of passion and power is enlisted in the effortto advance it. The _Advancement_ is far from being a perfect book. As asurvey 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 materialsof the time. Even the improved _De Augmentis_ is inadequate; and thereis reason to think the _Advancement_ was a hurried book, at least in thelater part, and it is defective in arrangement and proportion of parts. Two of the great divisions of knowledge--history and poetry--aredespatched in comparatively short chapters; while in the division on"Civil Knowledge, " human knowledge as it respects society, he inserts along essay, obviously complete in itself and clumsily thrust in here, onthe ways of getting on in the world, the means by which a man may be"_Faber fortunæ suæ_"--the architect of his own success; too lively apicture to be pleasant of the arts with which he had become acquaintedin the process of rising. The book, too, has the blemishes of its owntime; its want of simplicity, its inevitable though very often amusingand curious pedantries. But the _Advancement_ was the first of a longline of books which have attempted to teach English readers how to thinkof knowledge; to make it really and intelligently the interest, not ofthe school or the study or the laboratory only, but of society at large. It was a book with a purpose, new then, but of which we have seen thefulfilment. He wanted to impress on his generation, as a very practicalmatter, all that knowledge might do in wise hands, all that knowledgehad lost by the faults and errors of men and the misfortunes of time, all that knowledge might be pushed to in all directions by faithful andpatient industry and well-planned methods for the elevation and benefitof man in his highest capacities as well as in his humblest. And hefurther sought to teach them _how_ to know; to make them understand thatdifficult achievement of self-knowledge, to know _what it is_ to know;to give the first attempted chart to guide them among the shallows androcks and whirlpools which beset the course and action of thought andinquiry; to reveal to them the "idols" which unconsciously haunt theminds of the strongest as well as the weakest, and interpose theirdelusions when we are least aware--"the fallacies and false appearancesinseparable from our nature and our condition of life. " To induce men tobelieve not only that there was much to know that was not yet dreamedof, but that the way of knowing needed real and thorough improvement;that the knowing mind bore along with it all kinds of snares anddisqualifications of which it is unconscious; and that it neededtraining quite as much as materials to work on, was the object of the_Advancement_. It was but a sketch; but it was a sketch so truly andforcibly drawn, that it made an impression which has never beenweakened. To us its use and almost its interest is passed. But it is abook which we can never open without coming on some noble interpretationof the realities of nature or the mind; some unexpected discovery ofthat quick and keen eye which arrests us by its truth; some felicitousand unthought-of illustration, yet so natural as almost to be doomed tobecome a commonplace; some bright touch of his incorrigibleimaginativeness, ever ready to force itself in amid the driest detailsof his argument. 

The _Advancement_ was only one shape out of many into which he cast histhoughts. Bacon was not easily satisfied with his work; even when hepublished he did so, not because he had brought his work to the desiredpoint, but lest anything should happen to him and it should "perish. "Easy and unstudied as his writing seems, it was, as we have seen, theresult of unintermitted trouble and varied modes of working. He wasquite as much a talker as a writer, and beat out his thoughts into shapein talking. In the essay on _Friendship_ he describes the process with avividness which tells of his own experience--

 "But before you come to that [the faithful counsel that a man receiveth from his friend], certain it is that whosoever hath his mind fraught with 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 waxeth wiser than himself, and that more by 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 figure; 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 wits 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. "

Bacon, as has been said, was a great maker of notes and note-books: hewas careful not of the thought only, but of the very words in which itpresented itself; everything was collected that might turn out useful inhis writing or speaking, down to alternative modes of beginning orconnecting or ending a sentence. He watched over his intellectualappliances and resources much more strictly than over his moneyconcerns. He never threw away and never forgot what could be turned toaccount. He was never afraid of repeating himself, if he thought he hadsomething apt to say. He was never tired of recasting and rewriting, from a mere fragment or preface to a finished paper. He has favouriteimages, favourite maxims, favourite texts, which he cannot do without. "_Da Fidei quæ sunt Fidei_" comes in from his first book to his last. The illustrations which he gets from the myth of Scylla, from Atalanta'sball, from Borgia's saying about the French marking their lodgings withchalk, the saying that God takes delight, like the "innocent play ofchildren, " "to hide his works in order to have them found out, " and tohave kings as "his playfellows in that game, " these, with many others, reappear, however varied the context, from the first to the last of hiscompositions. An edition of Bacon, with marginal references and parallelpassages, would show a more persistent recurrence of characteristicillustrations and sentences than perhaps any other writer. 

The _Advancement_ was followed by attempts to give serious effect to itslesson. This was nearly all done in Latin. He did so, because in theseworks he spoke to a larger and, as he thought, more interested audience;the use of Latin marked the gravity of his subject as one that touchedall mankind; and the majesty of Latin suited his taste and his thoughts. Bacon spoke, indeed, impressively on the necessity of entering into therealm of knowledge in the spirit of a little child. He dwelt on theparamount importance of beginning from the very bottom of the scale offact, of understanding the commonplace things at our feet, so full ofwonder and mystery and instruction, before venturing on theories. Thesun is not polluted by shining on a dunghill, and no facts were tooignoble to be beneath the notice of the true student of nature. But hisown genius was for the grandeur and pomp of general views. The practicaldetails of experimental science were, except in partial instances, yet agreat way off; and what there was, he either did not care about orreally understand, and had no aptitude for handling. He knew enough togive reality to his argument; he knew, and insisted on it, that thelabour of observation and experiment would have to be very heavy andquite indispensable. But his own business was with great principles andnew truths; these were what had the real attraction for him; it was themagnificent thoughts and boundless hopes of the approaching "kingdom ofman" which kindled his imagination and fired his ambition. "He writesphilosophy, " said Harvey, who had come to his own great discoverythrough patient and obscure experiments on frogs and monkeys--"he writesphilosophy like a Lord Chancellor. " And for this part of the work, thestateliness and dignity of the Latin corresponded to the proud claimswhich he made for his conception of the knowledge which was to be. English seemed to him too homely to express the hopes of the world, toounstable to be trusted with them. Latin was the language of command andlaw. His Latin, without enslaving itself to Ciceronian types, and with afree infusion of barbarous but most convenient words from the vast andingenious terminology of the schoolmen, is singularly forcible andexpressive. It is almost always easy and clear; it can be vague andgeneral, and it can be very precise where precision is wanted. It can, on occasion, be magnificent, and its gravity is continually enlivened bythe play upon it, as upon a background, of his picturesque andunexpected fancies. The exposition of his philosophical principles wasattempted in two forms. He began in English. He began, in the shape of apersonal account, a statement of a series of conclusions to which histhinking had brought him, which he called the "Clue of the Labyrinth, "_Filum Labyrinthi_. But he laid this aside unfinished, and rewrote andcompleted it in Latin, with the title _Cogitata et Visa_. It gains bybeing in Latin; as Mr. Spedding says, "it must certainly be reckonedamong the most perfect of Bacon's productions. " The personal form witheach paragraph begins and ends. "_Franciscus Bacon sic cogitavit_ . .. _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 hasthe same kind of personal interest, only more solemn and commanding, which there is in Descartes's _Discours de la Méthode_. In this formBacon meant at first to publish. He sent it to his usual critics, SirThomas Bodley, Toby Matthews, and Bishop Andrewes. And he meant tofollow it up with a practical exemplification of his method. But hechanged his plan. He had more than once expressed his preference forthe form of _aphorisms_ over the argumentative and didactic continuityof a set discourse. He had, indeed, already twice begun a series ofaphorisms on the true methods of interpreting nature, and directing themind in the true path of knowledge, and had begun them with the samefamous aphorism with which the _Novum Organum_ opens. He now reverted tothe 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, butbroken up and rearranged in the new form of separate impersonalgeneralised observations. The points and assertions and issues which, ina continuous discourse, careful readers mark and careless ones miss, areone by one picked out and brought separately to the light. It beginswith brief, oracular, unproved maxims and propositions, and goes ongradually into larger developments and explanations. The aphorisms aremeant to strike, to awaken questions, to disturb prejudices, to let inlight into a nest of unsuspected intellectual confusions andself-misunderstandings, to be the mottoes and watchwords of many alaborious and difficult inquiry. They form a connected and orderedchain, though the ties between each link are not given. In this wayBacon put forth his proclamation of war on all that then called itselfscience; his announcement that the whole work of solid knowledge must bebegun afresh, and by a new, and, as he thought, infallible method. Onthis work Bacon concentrated all his care. It was twelve years in hand, and twelve times underwent his revision. "In the first book especially, "says Mr. Ellis, "every word seems to have been carefully weighed; and itwould be hard to omit or change anything without injuring the meaningwhich Bacon intended to convey. " Severe as it is, it is instinct withenthusiasm, sometimes with passion. The Latin in which it is writtenanswers to it; it has the conciseness, the breadth, the lordliness of agreat piece of philosophical legislation. 

The world has agreed to date from Bacon the systematic reform of naturalphilosophy, the beginning of an intelligent attempt, which has beencrowned by such signal success, to place the investigation of nature ona solid foundation. On purely scientific grounds his title to this greathonour may require considerable qualification. What one thing, it isasked, would not have been discovered in the age of Galileo and Harvey, if Bacon had never written? What one scientific discovery can be tracedto him, or to the observance of his peculiar rules? It was something, indeed, to have conceived, as clearly as he conceived it, the large andcomprehensive idea of what natural knowledge must be, and must restupon, even if he were not able to realise his idea, and were mistaken inhis practical methods of reform. But great ideas and great principlesneed their adequate interpreter, their _vates sacer_, if they are toinfluence the history of mankind. This was what Bacon was to science, tothat great change in the thoughts and activity of men in relation to theworld of nature around them: and this is his title to the great placeassigned to him. He not only understood 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 andfeel it too. And he was able to do this because he was one of the mostwonderful of thinkers and one of the greatest of writers. Thedisclosure, the interpretation, the development of that greatintellectual revolution which was in the air, and which was practicallycarried forward in obscurity, day by day, by the fathers of modernastronomy and chemistry and physiology, had fallen to the task of agenius, second only to Shakespeare. He had the power to tell the storyof what they were doing and were to do with a force of imaginativereason of which they were utterly incapable. He was able to justifytheir attempts and their hopes as they themselves could not. He was ableto interest the world in the great prospects opening on it, but of whichnone but a few students had the key. The calculations of the astronomer, the investigations of the physician, were more or less a subject oftalk, as curious or possibly useful employments. But that which boundthem together in the unity of science, which gave them their meaningbeyond themselves, which raised them to a higher level and gave themtheir real dignity among the pursuits of men, which forced all thinkingmen to see what new and unsuspected possibilities in the knowledge andin the condition of mankind were opened before them, was not Bacon's ownattempts at science, not even his collections of facts and his rules ofmethod, but that great idea of the reality and boundless worth ofknowledge which Bacon's penetrating and sure intuition had discerned, and which had taken possession of his whole nature. The impulse which hegave to the progress of science came from his magnificent and variedexposition of this idea; from his series of grand and memorablegeneralisations on the habits and faults of the human mind--on thedifficult and yet so obvious and so natural precautions necessary toguide it in the true and hopeful track. It came from the attractiveness, the enthusiasm, and the persuasiveness of the pleading; from the clearand forcible statements, the sustained eloquence, the generous hopes, the deep and earnest purpose of the _Advancement_ and the _DeAugmentis_; from the nobleness, the originality, the picturesqueness, the impressive and irresistible truth of the great aphorisms of the_Novum Organum_. 

 THE END