Bacon Part 2

BACON AND JAMES I.

Bacon's life was a double one. There was the life of high thinking, of disinterested aims, of genuine enthusiasm, of genuine desire to delight and benefit mankind, by opening new paths to wonder and knowledge and power. And there was the put on and worldly life, the life of supposed necessities for the provision of daily bread, the life of ambition and self-seeking, which he followed, not without interest and satisfaction, but at bottom because he thought he must--must be a great man, must be rich, must live in the favour of the great, because without it his great designs could not be accomplished. His original plan of life was disclosed in his letter to Lord Burghley: to get some office with an a.s.sured income and not much work, and then to devote the best of his time to his own subjects. But this, if it was really his plan, was gradually changed: first, because he could not get such a place; and next because his connection with Ess.e.x, the efforts to gain him the Attorney's place, and the use which the Queen made of him after Ess.e.x could do no more for him, drew him more and more into public work, and specially the career of the law. We know that he would not by preference have chosen the law, and did not feel that his vocation lay that way; but it was the only way open to him for mending his fortunes. And so the two lives went on side by side, the worldly one--he would have said, the practical one--often interfering with the life of thought and discovery, and partly obscuring it, but yet always leaving it paramount in his own mind. His dearest and most cherished ideas, the thoughts with which he was most at home and happiest, his deepest and truest ambitions, were those of an enthusiastic and romantic believer in a great discovery just within his grasp. They were such as the dreams and visions of his great Franciscan namesake, and of the imaginative seekers after knowledge in the middle ages, real or mythical, Albert the Great, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus; they were the eager, undoubting hopes of the physical students in Italy and England in his own time, Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert, Galileo, or the founders of the Italian prototype of "Solomon's House" in the _New Atlantis_, the precursor of our Royal Societies, the Academy of the _Lincei_ at Rome.

Among these meditations was his inner life. But however he may have originally planned his course, and though at times under the influence of disappointment he threatened to retire to Cambridge or to travel abroad, he had bound himself fast to public life, and soon ceased to think of quitting it. And he had a real taste for it--for its shows, its prizes, for the laws and turns of the game, for its debates and vicissitudes. He was no mere idealist or recluse to undervalue or despise the real grandeur of the world. He took the keenest interest in the nature and ways of mankind; he liked to observe, to generalise in shrewd and sometimes cynical epigrams. He liked to apply his powerful and fertile intellect to the practical problems of society and government, to their curious anomalies, to their paradoxical phenomena; he liked to address himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, to the principles and entanglements of English law; he aspired, both as a lecturer and a legislator, to improve and simplify it. It was not beyond his hopes to shape a policy, to improve administration, to become powerful by bringing his sagacity and largeness of thought to the service of the State, in reconciling conflicting forces, in mediating between jealous parties and dangerous claims. And he liked to enter into the humours of a Court; to devote his brilliant imagination and affluence of invention either to devising a pageant which should throw all others into the shade, or a compromise which should get great persons out of some difficulty of temper or pique.

In all these things he was as industrious, as laborious, as calmly persevering and tenacious, as he was in his pursuit of his philosophical speculations. He was a compound of the most adventurous and most diversified ambition, with a placid and patient temper, such as we commonly a.s.sociate with moderate desires and the love of retirement and an easy life. To imagine and dare anything, and never to let go the object of his pursuit, is one side of him; on the other he is obsequiously desirous to please and fearful of giving offence, the humblest and most grateful and also the most importunate of suitors, ready to bide his time with an even cheerfulness of spirit, which yet it was not safe to provoke by ill offices and the wish to thwart him. He never misses a chance of proffering his services; he never lets pa.s.s an opportunity of recommending himself to those who could help him. He is so bent on natural knowledge that we have a sense of incongruity when we see him engaging in politics as if he had no other interest. He throws himself with such zest into the language of the moralist, the theologian, the historian, that we forget we have before us the author of a new departure in physical inquiry, and the unwearied compiler of tables of natural history. When he is a lawyer, he seems only a lawyer.

If he had not been the author of the _Instauratio_, his life would not have looked very different from that of any other of the shrewd and supple lawyers who hung on to the Tudor and Stuart Courts, and who unscrupulously pushed their way to preferment. He claimed to be, in spite of the misgivings of Elizabeth and her ministers, as devoted to public work and as capable of it as any of them. He was ready for anything, for any amount of business, ready, as in everything, to take infinite trouble about it. The law, if he did not like it, was yet no by-work with him; he was as truly ambitious as the men with whom he maintained so keen and for long so unsuccessful a rivalry. He felt bitterly the disappointment of seeing men like c.o.ke and Fleming and Doddridge and Hobart pa.s.s before him; he could not, if he had been only a lawyer, have coveted more eagerly the places, refused to him, which they got; only, he had besides a whole train of purposes, an inner and supreme ambition, of which they knew nothing. And with all this there is no apparent consciousness of these manifold and varied interests. He never affected to conceal from himself his superiority to other men in his aims and in the grasp of his intelligence. But there is no trace that he prided himself on the variety and versatility of these powers, or that he even distinctly realized to himself that it was anything remarkable that he should have so many dissimilar objects and be able so readily to pursue them in such different directions.

It is doubtful whether, as long as Elizabeth lived, Bacon could ever have risen above his position among the "Learned Counsel," an office without patent or salary or regular employment. She used, him, and he was willing to be used; but he plainly did not appear in her eyes to be the kind of man who would suit her in the more prominent posts of her Government. Unusual and original ability is apt, till it is generally recognised, to carry with it suspicion and mistrust as to its being really all that it seems to be. Perhaps she thought of the possibility of his flying out unexpectedly at some inconvenient pinch, and attempting to serve her interests, not in her way, but in his own; perhaps she distrusted in business and state affairs so brilliant a discourser, whose heart was known, first and above all, to be set on great dreams of knowledge; perhaps those interviews with her in which he describes the counsels which he laid before her, and in which his shrewdness and foresight are conspicuous, may not have been so welcome to her as he imagined; perhaps, it is not impossible, that he may have been too compliant for her capricious taste, and too visibly anxious to please. Perhaps, too, she could not forget, in spite of what had happened, that he had been the friend, and not the very generous friend, of Ess.e.x. But, except as to a share of the forfeitures, with which he was not satisfied, his fortunes did not rise under Elizabeth.

Whatever may have been the Queen's feelings towards him, there is no doubt that one powerful influence, which lasted into the reign of James, was steadily adverse to his advancement. Burghley had been strangely n.i.g.g.ardly in what he did to help his brilliant nephew; he was going off the scene, and probably did not care to trouble himself about a younger and uncongenial aspirant to service. But his place was taken by his son, Robert Cecil; and Cecil might naturally have been expected to welcome the co-operation of one of his own family who was foremost among the rising men of Cecil's own generation, and who certainly was most desirous to do him service. But it is plain that he early made up his mind to keep Bacon in the background. It is easy to imagine reasons, though the apparent short-sightedness of the policy may surprise us; but Cecil was too reticent and self-controlled a man to let his reasons appear, and his words, in answer to his cousin's applications for his a.s.sistance, were always kind, encouraging, and vague. But we must judge by the event, and that makes it clear that Cecil did not care to see Bacon in high position. Nothing can account for Bacon's strange failure for so long a time to reach his due place in the public service but the secret hostility, whatever may have been the cause, of Cecil.

There was also another difficulty. c.o.ke was the great lawyer of the day, a man whom the Government could not dispense with, and whom it was dangerous to offend. And c.o.ke thoroughly disliked Bacon. He thought lightly of his law, and he despised his refinement and his pa.s.sion for knowledge. He cannot but have resented the impertinence, as he must have thought it, of Bacon having been for a whole year his rival for office.

It is possible that if people then agreed with Mr. Spedding's opinion as to the management of Ess.e.x's trial, he may have been irritated by jealousy; but a couple of months after the trial (April 29, 1601) Bacon sent to Cecil, with a letter of complaint, the following account of a scene in Court between c.o.ke 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 G.o.d 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 the arrest of Bacon for debt in September, 1593. After this we are not surprised at Bacon writing to c.o.ke, "who take to yourself a liberty to disgrace and disable my law, my experience, my discretion," that, "since I missed the Solicitor's place (the rather I think by your means) I cannot expect that you and I shall ever serve as Attorney and Solicitor together, but either serve with another on your remove, or step into some other course." And c.o.ke, no doubt, took care that it should be so.

Cecil, too, may possibly have thought that Bacon gave no proof of his fitness for affairs in thus bringing before him a squabble in which both parties lost their tempers.

Bacon was not behind the rest of the world in "the posting of men of good quality towards the King," in the rash which followed the Queen's death, of those who were eager to proffer their services to James, for whose peaceful accession Cecil had so skilfully prepared the way. He wrote to every one who, he thought, could help him: to Cecil, and to Cecil's man--"I pray you, as you find time let him know that he is the personage in the State which I love most;" to Northumberland, "If I may be of any use to your Lordship, by my head, tongue, pen, means, or friends, I humbly pray you to hold me your own;" to the King's Scotch friends and servants, even to Southampton, the friend of Ess.e.x, who had been shut up in the Tower since his condemnation with Ess.e.x, and who was now released. "This great change," Bacon a.s.sured him, "hath wrought in me no other change towards your Lordship than this, that I may safely be now that which I truly was before." Bacon found in after years that Southampton was not so easily conciliated. But at present Bacon was hopeful: "In mine own particular," he writes, "I have many comforts and a.s.surances; but in mine own opinion the chief is, that the _canva.s.sing world is gone, and the deserving world is come_." He asks to be recommended to the King--"I commend myself to your love and to the well-using of my name, as well in repressing and answering for me, if there be any biting or nibbling at it in that place, as in impressing a good conceit and opinion of me, chiefly in the King, as otherwise in that Court." His pen had been used under the government of the Queen, and he had offered a draft of a proclamation to the King's advisers. But though he obtained an interview with the King, James's arrival in England brought no immediate prospect of improvement in Bacon's fortunes. Indeed, his name was at first inadvertently pa.s.sed over in the list of Queen's servants who were to retain their places. The first thing we hear of is his arrest a second time for debt; and his letters of thanks to Cecil, who had rendered him a.s.sistance, are written in deep depression.

"For my purpose or course I desire to meddle as little as I can in the King's causes, his Majesty now abounding in counsel, and to follow my private thrift and practice, and to marry with some convenient advancement. For as for any ambition, I do a.s.sure 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 prost.i.tuted t.i.tle 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 repaid by the day; and Bacon only makes a humble request, which, it might be supposed, 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: princ.i.p.al, 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 t.i.tle, but not in a manner to distinguish him. He was knighted at Whitehall two days before the coronation, but had to share the honour with 300 others."

It was not quite true that his "ambition was quenched." For the rest of Cecil's life Cecil was the first man at James's Court; and to the last there was one thing that Bacon would not appear to believe--he did not choose to believe that it was Cecil who kept him back from employment and honour. To the last he persisted in a.s.suming that Cecil was the person who would help, if he could, a kinsman devoted to his interests and profoundly conscious of his worth. To the last he commended his cause to Cecil in terms of unstinted affection and confiding hope. It is difficult to judge of the sincerity of such language. The mere customary language of compliment employed by every one at this time was of a kind which to us sounds intolerable. It seems as if nothing that ingenuity could devise was too extravagant for an honest man to use, and for a man who respected himself to accept. It must not, indeed, be forgotten that conventionalities, as well as insincerity, differ in their forms in different times; and that insincerity may lurk behind frank and clear words, when they are the fashion, as much as in what is like mere fulsome adulation. But words mean something, in spite of forms and fashions. When a man of great genius writes his private letters, we wish generally to believe on the whole what he says; and there are no limits to the esteem, the honour, the confidence, which Bacon continued to the end to express towards Cecil. Bacon appeared to trust him--appeared, in spite of continued disappointments, to rely on his good-will and good offices. But for one reason or another Bacon still remained in the shade. He was left to employ his time as he would, and to work his way by himself.

He was not idle. He prepared papers which he meant should come before the King, on the pressing subjects of the day. The Hampton Court conference between the Bishops and the Puritan leaders was at hand, and he drew up a moderating paper on the _Pacification of the Church_. The feeling against him for his conduct towards Ess.e.x had not died away, and he addressed to Lord Mountjoy that _Apology concerning the Earl of Ess.e.x_, so full of interest, so skilfully and forcibly written, so vivid a picture of the Queen's ways with her servants, which has every merit except that of clearing Bacon from the charge of disloyalty to his best friend. The various questions arising out of the relations of the two kingdoms, now united under James, were presenting themselves. They were not of easy solution, and great mischief would follow if they were solved wrongly. Bacon turned his attention to them. He addressed a discourse to the King on the union of the two kingdoms, the first of a series of discussions on the subject which Bacon made peculiarly his own, and which, no doubt, first drew the King's attention and favour to him.

But for the first year of James's reign he was unnoticed by the King, and he was able to give his attention more freely to the great thought and hope of his life. This time of neglect gave him the opportunity of leisurely calling together and examining the ideas which had long had hold of his mind about the state of human knowledge, about the possibilities of extending it, about the hopes and powers which that new knowledge opened, and about the methods of realising this great prospect. This, the pa.s.sion of his life, never asleep even in the hottest days of business or the most hopeless days of defeat, must have had full play during these days of suspended public employment. He was a man who was not easily satisfied with his attempts to arrange the order and proportions of his plans for mastering that new world of unknown truth, which he held to be within the grasp of man if he would only dare to seize it; and he was much given to vary the shape of his work, and to try experiments in composition and even style. He wrote and rewrote.

Besides what was finally published, there remains a larger quant.i.ty of work which never reached the stage of publication. He repeated over and over again the same thoughts, the same images and characteristic sayings. Among these papers is one which sums up his convictions about the work before him, and the vocation to which he had been called in respect of it. It is in the form of a "Proem" to a treatise on the _Interpretation of Nature_. It was never used in his published works; but, as Mr. Spedding says, it has a peculiar value as an authentic statement of what he looked upon as his special business in life. It is this mission which he states to himself in the following paper. It is drawn up in "stately Latin." Mr. Spedding's translation is no unworthy representation of the words of the great Prophet of Knowledge:

"Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the Commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted 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 a.s.sert, 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 an industrious public life, which was not to be interrupted till it finally came to an end with his strange and irretrievable fall. The opportunity had come; and Bacon, patient, vigilant, and conscious of great powers and indefatigable energy, fully aware of all the conditions of the time, pushed at once to the front in the House of Commons. He lost no time in showing that he meant to make himself felt. The House of Commons had no sooner met than it was involved in a contest with the Chancery, with the Lords, and finally with the King himself, about its privileges--in this case its exclusive right to judge of the returns of its members. Bacon's time was come for showing the King both that he was willing to do him service, and that he was worth being employed. He took a leading part in the discussions, and was trusted by the House as their spokesman and reporter in the various conferences. The King, in his overweening confidence in his absolute prerogative, had, indeed, got himself into serious difficulty; for the privilege was one which it was impossible for the Commons to give up. But Bacon led the House to agree to an arrangement which saved their rights; and under a cloud of words of extravagant flattery he put the King in good-humour, and elicited from him the spontaneous proposal of a compromise which ended a very dangerous dispute. "The King's voice," said Bacon, in his report to the House, "was the voice of G.o.d in man, the good spirit of G.o.d in the mouth of man; I do not say the voice of G.o.d and not of man; I am not one of Herod's flatterers; a curse fell upon him that said it, a curse on him that suffered it. We might say, as was said to Solomon, We are glad, O King, that we give account to you, because you discern what is spoken."

The course of this Parliament, in which Bacon was active and prominent, showed the King, probably for the first time, what Bacon was. The session was not so stormy as some of the later ones; but occasions arose which revealed to the King and to the House of Commons the deeply discordant a.s.sumptions and purposes by which each party was influenced, and which brought out Bacon's powers of adjusting difficulties and harmonising claims. He never wavered in his loyalty to his own House, where it is clear that his authority was great. But there was no limit to the submission and reverence which he expressed to the King, and, indeed, to his desire to bring about what the King desired, as far as it could be safely done. Dealing with the Commons, his policy was "to be content with the substance and not to stand on the form." Dealing with the King, he was forward to recognise all that James wanted recognised of his kingcraft and his absolute sovereignty. Bacon a.s.sailed with a force and keenness which showed what he could do as an opponent, the amazing and intolerable grievances arising out of the survival of such feudal customs as Wardship and Purveyance; customs which made over a man's eldest son and property, during a minority, to the keeping of the King, that is, to a King's favourite, and allowed the King's servants to cut down a man's timber before the windows of his house. But he urged that these grievances should be taken away with the utmost tenderness for the King's honour and the King's purse. In the great and troublesome questions relating to the Union he took care to be fully prepared. He was equally strong on points of certain and substantial importance, equally quick to suggest accommodations where nothing substantial was touched. His att.i.tude was one of friendly and respectful independence.

It was not misunderstood by the King. Bacon, who had hitherto been an unsworn and unpaid member of the Learned Counsel, now received his office by patent, with a small salary, and he was charged with the grave business of preparing the work for the Commissioners for the Union of the Kingdoms, in which, when the Commission met, he took a foremost and successful part.

But the Parliament before which their report was to be laid did not meet till ten months after the work of the Commission was done (Dec., 1604--Nov., 1605). For nearly another year Bacon had no public work. The leisure was used for his own objects. He was interested in history in a degree only second to his interest in nature; indeed, but for the engrossing claims of his philosophy of nature, he might have been the first and one of the greatest of our historians. He addressed a letter to the Chancellor Ellesmere on the deficiencies of British history, and on the opportunities which offered for supplying them. He himself could at present do nothing; "but because there be so many good painters, both for hand and colours, it needeth but encouragement and instructions to give life and light unto it." But he mistook, in this as in other instances, the way in which such things are done. Men do not accomplish such things to order, but because their souls compel them, as he himself was building up his great philosophical structure, in the midst of his ambition and disappointment. And this interval of quiet enabled him to bring out his first public appeal on the subject which most filled his mind. He completed in English the _Two Books of the Advancement of Knowledge_, which were published at a book-shop at the gateway of Gray's Inn in Holborn (Oct., 1605). He intended that it should be published in Latin also; but he was dissatisfied with the ornate translation sent him from Cambridge, and probably he was in a hurry to get the book out. It was dedicated to the King, not merely by way of compliment, but with the serious hope that his interest might be awakened in the subjects which were nearest Bacon's heart. Like other of Bacon's hopes, it was disappointed. The King's studies and the King's humours were not of the kind to make him care for Bacon's visions of the future, or his eager desire to begin at once a novel method of investigating the facts and laws of nature; and the appeal to him fell dead. Bacon sent the book about to his friends with explanatory letters. To Sir T. Bodley he writes:

"I 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 his purpose by an image which he repeats more than once. "I shall content myself to awake better spirits, _like a bell-ringer, which is first up to call others to church_." But the two friends whose judgment he chiefly valued, and who, as on other occasions, were taken into his most intimate literary confidence, were Bishop Andrewes, his "inquisitor,"

and Toby Matthews, a son of the Archbishop of York, who had become a Roman Catholic, and lived in Italy, seeing a good deal of learned men there, apparently the most trusted of all Bacon's friends.

When Parliament met again in November, 1605, the Gunpowder Plot and its consequences filled all minds. Bacon was not employed about it by Government, and his work in the House was confined to carrying on matters left unfinished from the previous session. On the rumour of legal promotions and vacancies Bacon once more applied to Salisbury for the Solicitorship (March, 1606). But no changes were made, and Bacon was "still next the door." In May, 1606, he did what had for some time been in his thoughts: he married; not the lady whom Ess.e.x had tried to win for him, that Lady Hatton who became the wife of his rival c.o.ke, but one whom Salisbury helped him to gain, an alderman's daughter, Alice Barnham, "an handsome maiden," with some money and a disagreeable mother, by her second marriage, Lady Packington. Bacon's curious love of pomp amused the gossips of the day. "Sir Francis Bacon," writes Carleton to Chamberlain, "was married yesterday to his young wench, in Maribone Chapel. He was clad from top to toe in purple, and hath made himself and his wife such store of raiments of cloth of silver and gold that it draws deep into her portion." Of his married life we hear next to nothing: in his _Essay on Marriage_ he is not enthusiastic in its praise; almost the only thing we know is that in his will, twenty years afterwards, he showed his dissatisfaction with his wife, who after his death married again. But it gave him an additional reason, and an additional plea, for pressing for preferment, and in the summer of 1606 the opening came. c.o.ke was made Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas, leaving the Attorney's place vacant. A favourite of Salisbury's, Hobart, became Attorney, and Bacon hoped for some arrangement by which the Solicitor Doddridge might be otherwise provided for, and he himself become Solicitor. Hopeful as he was, and patient of disappointments, and of what other men would have thought injustice and faithlessness, he felt keenly both the disgrace and the inconvenience of so often expecting place, and being so often pa.s.sed over. While the question was pending, he wrote to the King, the Chancellor, and Salisbury. His letter to the King is a record in his own words of his public services. To the Chancellor, whom he believed to be his supporter, he represented the discredit which he suffered--he was a common gaze and a speech;" "the little reputation which by his industry he gathered, being scattered and taken away by continual disgraces, _every new man coming above me_;" and his wife and his wife's friends were making him feel it. The letters show what Bacon thought to be his claims, and how hard he found it to get 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.ble 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 be content with another promise. Considering the ability which he had shown in Parliament, the wisdom and zeal with which he had supported the Government, and the important position which he held in the House of Commons, the neglect of him is unintelligible, except on two suppositions: that the Government, that is Cecil, were afraid of anything but the mere routine of law, as represented by such men as Hobart and Doddridge; or that c.o.ke's hostility to him was unabated, and c.o.ke still too important to be offended.

Bacon returned to work when the Parliament met, November, 1606. The questions arising out of the Union, the question of naturalisation, its grounds and limits, the position of Scotchmen born _before_ or _since_ the King's accession, the _Antenati_ and _Postnati_, the question of a union of laws, with its consequences, were discussed with great keenness and much jealous feeling. On the question of naturalisation Bacon took the liberal and larger view. The immediate union of laws he opposed as premature. He was a willing servant of the House, and the House readily made use of him. He reported the result of conferences, even when his own opinion was adverse to that of the House. And he reported the speeches of such persons as Lord Salisbury, probably throwing into them both form and matter of his own. At length, "silently, on the 25th of June," 1607, he was appointed Solicitor-General. He was then forty-seven.

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