reflections on human nature and conduct which seemed to come from a sober observer of affairs, from one of infinitely varied experience, from a thinker not unduly biassed by his material interests. Revision and enlargement of his Essays constantly occupied Bacon's scanty leisure till his death.

In 1605, two years after James's accession, there appeared a far more convincing proof of disinterested devotion to things of the mind. Bacon then published his greatest contribution in English to philosophical literature, his Advancement of Learning. It was a popular work, treating eloquently of the excellence of knowledge and noting in detail the sufficiency and insufficiency of its present state. Bacon surveyed fairly and sagaciously all existing departments of knowledge, and indicated where progress was most essential. The noble volume was intended to prepare the minds of readers for the greater venture which absorbed Bacon's thoughts, the exposition of a new philosophy, a new instrument of thought, the Novum Organum. This new instrument designed first to enable man to interpret nature and thereby realise of what the forces of nature were capable, and then to give him the power of adapting those forces to his own purposes. In the completion of that great design lay Bacon's genuine ambition; from birth to death, political office, the rewards of the legal profession, money profits, anxious as he was to win them, were means to serve his attainment of that great end. All material successes in life were

the number of essays up to thirty-eight. Other editions followed, including a Latin translation by the author and translations by English friends into both Italian and French. The final edition, the publication of which Bacon superintended, is dated 1625 (the year before his death), and supplied as many as fifty-eight essays. An addition to the collection, a fragment of an essay of 'Fame,' appeared posthumously. This was included by Dr. William Rawley, Bacon's chaplain, into whose hands his master's manuscripts passed at his death, in the miscellaneous volume which Rawley edited in 1657 under the title of Resuscitatio.

in his view crude earthworks which protected from assault and preserved intact the citadel of his being.

Slowly but surely the material recognition, the emoluments for which he hungered, came Bacon's way. In 1606, at the age of forty-five, he married. His wife was the

city of London,

Marriage.

Little is known of Bacon's

daughter of an alderman in the and brought him a good dowry. domestic life, and some mystery overhangs its close. He had no children, but according to his earliest biographer he was a considerate and generous husband.1 In the last year of his life, however, he believed he had serious ground of complaint against his wife, and the munificent provision which he made for her in the text of his will he in a concluding paragraph, 'for just and grave causes, utterly revoked and made void, leaving her to her right only.' He acquired a love of magnificence in his domestic life, which he indulged to an extent that caused him pecuniary embarrassments. It was soon after he entered the estate of matrimony that he put in order, at vast expense, the property at Gorhambury, near St. Albans, which his father had acquired, and he built upon the land there a new country residence of great dimensions, Verulam House. In the decoration and furnishing of the mansion he spent far more than he could afford. There he maintained a retinue of servants the number of whom, it was said, was hardly exceeded in the palace of the king.

Bacon's material resources rapidly grew after his marriage.

1 Dr. William Rawley, Bacon's chaplain, in his Life, ed. 1670, p. 6, writes with some obvious economy of truth:-'Neither did the want of children detract from his good usage of his consort during the intermarriage; whom he prosecuted, with much conjugal love and respect: with many rich gifts, and endowments; besides a robe of honour, which he invested her withal: which she wore until her dying day, being twenty years and more, after his death.' According to Aubrey, after Bacon's death she married her gentleman-usher, Sir Thomas Underhill, and survived the execution of Charles I. in 1649.

His first

A year later he received his first official promotion. In 1607 he was made Solicitor-General, a high legal office, and one well remunerated. He had waited long for such conpromotion. spicuous advancement. He was now forty-six years old, and the triumph did not cause him undue elation. He suffered, he writes, much depression during the months that followed. But his ambition was far from satiated.

General.

Attorney- A repetition of the experience happily brought him greater content. Six years later, at fiftytwo, he was promoted to the more responsible and more highly | remunerated office of Attorney-General.

VII

The breach between the king and his people was meanwhile widening. The Commons were reluctant to grant the king's The politidemand for money without exacting guarantees of cal peril. honest government-guarantees for the expenditure of the people's money in a way that should benefit them. Such demands and criticism the king warmly resented. He was bent on ruling autocratically. He would draw taxes from his people at his unfettered will. The hopelessness of expecting genuine benefit to the nation from James's exercise of authority was now apparent. Had Bacon been a highminded, disinterested politician, withdrawal from the king's service would have been the only course open to him; but he had an instinctive respect for authority, his private expenses were mounting high, and he was at length reaping pecuniary rewards in the legal and political spheres. Bacon deliberately chose the worser way. He abandoned in practice the last shreds of his political principles; he gave up all hope of bringing about an accommodation on lines of right and justice between the king and the people. He made up his

mind to remain a servant of the crown, with the single and unpraiseworthy end of benefiting his own pocket.

Bacon and

Tricks and subterfuges, dissimulation, evasion, were thenceforth Bacon's political resources. He soon sought assiduously the favour of the king's new and worthless favourite, the Duke of Buckingham. For a fleeting moment he seems to have tried to deceive himself, as he had tried to deceive himself in the case of Essex and of the king, into the notion that this selfish, unprincipled Buckingcourtier might impress a statesmanlike ideal on the king's government. Bacon offered Buckingham some advice under this misconception. But Bacon quickly recognised his error. The good counsel was not repeated. He finally abandoned himself exclusively to the language of unblushing adulation in his intercourse with the favourite in order to benefit by the favourite's influence.

ham.

Bacon's policy gained him all the success that he could have looked for. A greater promotion than any he had enjoyed soon befell him. The Lord Keepership of Lord the Great Seal, the highest legal office, to which Keeper. belonged the functions of the Lord Chancellor, became vacant. It was the post which Bacon's father had filled, and the son proposed himself to Buckingham as a candidate. Bacon secured, in 1617, the lofty dignity on the sole ground that the favourite thought he might prove a useful, subservient tool. But a rough justice governed the political world even in James 1.'s reign. Bacon's elevation to the high office proved his ruin. Bacon was now not only the foremost judge in the land, but was also chief member of the King's Council. Lord VeruHe had become, however, the mere creature of the crown, and all his political intelligence he suffered to run to waste. The favourite, Buckingham, was supreme with the king, and Bacon played a very subordinate part

lam and Viscount

St. Alban,

in discussions of high policy. He obsequiously assented to measures which he knew to be disastrous, and even submitted meekly to the personal humiliations which subservience to Buckingham-an exacting master—required. For a time his pusillanimity continued to bring rewards. In 1618 he was raised to the peerage, as Baron Verulam; in 1619 he exchanged, without alteration of function, the title of Lord Keeper of the Great Seal for the more dignified style of Lord High Chancellor of England. Two years later he was advanced to a higher rank of nobility as Viscount St. Alban. His paternal estate, on which he had built his sumptuous pleasure-house, lay near the city of St. Albans, and that city occupied the site of the Roman city of Verulamium. He felt a scholar's pride in associating his name with a relic of ancient Rome.

It may be admitted that Bacon's quick intelligence rendered him a very efficient and rapid judge in his court, the

His judicial work.

Court of Chancery. He rapidly cleared off arrears of business, and seems to have done as a

But he was not, even The favourite, Buckingrequesting him to show

rule substantial justice to suitors. in his own court, his own master. ham, inundated him with letters favour to friends of his who were interested in causes in Bacon's court. Bacon's moral sense was too weak to permit resistance to the favourite's insolent demands.

The approaching danger.

Bacon's moral perception was indeed blurred past recovery. Servility to the king and his favourite had obvious dangers, of which he failed to take note. Resentment was rising in the country against the royal power, and that rebellious sentiment was certain sooner or later to threaten with disaster those who for worldly gain bartered their souls to the king and his minion. wheel was coming full circle.

The