gators, to force her to deliver up her secrets; but the Solomon who was then king of England preferred to spend his money on quite different objects; and Bacon's compliances, therefore, gave him as little real power over Nature as real power in the direction of affairs. As it is our purpose not to excuse, but to explain, Bacon's conduct, to identify the Bacon who during this period wrote The Advancement of Learning, The Wisdom of the Ancients, and the Novum Organum, with the Bacon who within the same period was connected with the abuses of James's administration, — let us survey his character in relation to his times. He lived in an epoch when the elements of the English Constitution were in a state of anarchy. The King was following that executive instinct which brought the head of his son to the block. The House of Commons was following that legislative instinct which eventually gave it the control of the executive administration. James talked, and feebly acted, in the spirit of an absolute monarch, looked upon the House of Commons as only an instrument for getting at the money of his subjects, and when it occupied itself in presenting grievances, instead of voting subsidies, either dissolved it in a pet or yielded to it in a fright. Had Bacon's nature been as intense as it was sagacious, had he been a resolute statesman of the good or bad type, this was the

time for him to have anticipated Hampden in the Commons, or Strafford in the Council, and given himself, body and soul, to the cause of freedom or the cause of despotism. He did neither; and there is nothing in his writings which would lead us to suppose that he could have done either. The written advice he gave James and Buckingham on the improvement of the law, on church affairs, and on affairs of state, would, if it had been followed, have saved England from the necessity for the Long Parliament, Oliver Cromwell, and William of Orange. As it was, he probably prevented more evil than he was made the instrument of committing. But, after counselling wisely, he, like other statesmen of his time, consented to act against his own advice. He lent the aid of his professional skill to the court, yet rather as a lawyer who obeys a client than as a statesman responsible to his country. And the mischief was, that his mind, like all comprehensive minds, was so fertile in those reasons which convert what is abstractly wrong into what is relatively right, that he could easily find maxims of state to justify the attorney-general in doing what the statesman in the attorney-general condemned, especially as the practice of these maxims enabled the attorney-general to keep his office and to hope for at higher one. This was largely the custom with all English public men down to the time when "parliamentary

government" was thoroughly established. Besides, Bacon's attention was scattered over too many objects to allow of an all-excluding devotion to one. He could not be a Hampden or a Strafford, because he was Bacon. Accomplished as a courtier, politician, orator, lawyer, jurist, statesman, man of letters, philosopher, with a widewandering mind that swept over the domain of positive knowledge only to turn dissatisfied into those vast and lonely tracts of meditation where future sciences and inventions slept in their undiscovered principles, it was impossible that a man thus hundred-eyed should be single-handed. He also lacked two elements of strength which in that day lent vigor to action by contracting thought and inflaming passion. He was without political and theological prejudice, and he was without political and theological malignity.

But, it may be asked, if he was too broad for the passions of politics, why did he become a politician at all? First, because he was an Englishman, the son of the Keeper of the Great Seal, and had breathed an atmosphere of politics-and of not very scrupulous politics-from his cradle; second, because, well as he thought he understood nature, he understood human nature far better, and was tempted into affairs by conscious talent; and third, because he was poor, dependent, had immense needs, and saw that poli

tics had led his father and uncle to wealth and power. And, coming to the heart of the matter, if it be asked why a mind of such grandeur and comprehensiveness should sacrifice its integrity for such wealth as office could give, and such titles as James could bestow, we can answer the question intelligently only by looking at wealth and titles through Bacon's eyes. His conscience was weakened by that which gives such splendor and attractiveness to his writings, his imagination. He was a philosopher, but a philosopher in whose character imagination was co-ordinated with reason. This imagination was not merely a quality of his intellect, but an element of his nature: and as, through its instinctive workings, he was not content to send out his thoughts stoically bare of adornment, or limping and ragged in cynic squalor, but clothed them in purple and gold, and made them move in majestic cadences: so also, through his imagination, he saw, in external pomp and affluence and high place, something that corresponded to his own inward opulence and autocracy of intellect; recognized in them the superb and fitting adjuncts and symbols of his internal greatness; and, investing them with a glory not their own, felt that in them the great Bacon was clothed in outward circumstance, that the invisible person was made palpable to the senses, embod ied and expressed to all eyes as the man

Whom a wise king and Nature chose

Lord Chancellor of both their Laws."

So strong was this illusion, that, when hurled from power and hunted by creditors, he refused to raise money by cutting down the woods of his estate. "I will not,” he said, "be stripped of my fine feathers." He had so completely ensouled the accompaniments and "compliment extern of greatness, that he felt, in losing them, as if portions of the outgrowth of his being had been rudely lopped.

But a day of reckoning was at hand, which was to dissipate all this visionary splendor, and show the hollowness of all accomplishments when unaccompanied by simple integrity. Bacon had idly drifted with the stream of abuses, until at last he partook of them. It is to his credit, that, in 1621, he strenuously advised the calling of the Parliament by which he was impeached. The representatives of the people met in a furious mood, and exhibited a menacing attitude towards the court; and the King, thoroughly cowed, made haste to give up to their vengeful justice the culprits at whom they aimed. Bacon was impeached for corruption in his high office, and, in indescribable agony and abasement of spirit, was compelled by the King to plead guilty to the charges, of a large portion of which he was certainly innocent. The great Chancellor has ever since been