having conspired to bind Jupiter, Pallas called Briareus, with his hundred hands, to his aid; expounded, that monarchies need not fear any curbing of their absoluteness by mighty subjects, as long as by wisdom they keep the hearts of the people, who will be sure to come in on their side. So in the fable, that Achilles was brought up under Chiron, the centaur, who was part a man and part a beast, expounded ingeniously, but corruptly by Machiavel, that it belongeth to the education and discipline of princes to know as well how to play the part of the lion in violence, and the fox in guile, as of the man in virtue and justice. Nevertheless, in many the like encounters, I do rather think that the fable was first, and the exposition then devised, than that the moral was first, and thereupon the fable framed.
For I find it was an ancient vanity in Chrysippus, that troubled himself with great contention to fasten the assertions of the stoics upon the fictions of the ancient poets; but yet that all the fables and fictions of the poets were but pleasure, and not figure, I interpose no opinion. Surely, of those poets which are now extant, even Homer himself (notwithstanding he was made a kind of Scripture by the latter schools of the Grecians), yet I should without any difficulty pronounce that his fables had no such inwardness in his own meaning; but what they might have upon a more original tradition, is not easy to affirm; for he was not the inventor of many of them.”
In the treatise _De Augmentis_ the same sentiments will be found, with a slight alteration in the expressions. He says:— “There is another use of parabolical poesy opposite to the former, which tendeth to the folding up of those things, the dignity whereof deserves to be retired and distinguished, as with a drawn curtain; that is, when the secrets and mysteries of religion, policy, and philosophy are veiled and invested with fables and parables. But whether there be any mystical sense couched under the ancient fables of the poets, may admit some doubt; and, indeed, for our part, we incline to this opinion, as to think that there was an infused mystery in many of the ancient fables of the poets. Neither doth it move us that these matters are left commonly to school-boys and grammarians, and so are embased, that we should therefore make a slight judgment upon them, but contrariwise, because it is clear that the writings which recite those fables, of all the writings of men, next to sacred writ, are the most ancient; and that the fables themselves are far more ancient than they (being they are alleged by those writers, not as excogitated by them, but as credited and recepted before) seem to be, like a thin rarefied air, which, from the traditions of more ancient nations, fell into the flutes of the Grecians.”
Of this tract, Archbishop Tenison, in his _Baconiana_, says:— “In the seventh place, I may reckon his book _De Sapientia Veterum_, written by him in Latin, and set forth a second time with enlargement; and translated into English by Sir Arthur Gorges; a book in which the sages of former times are rendered more wise than it may be they were, by so dexterous an interpreter of their fables. It is this book which Mr. Sandys means, in those words which he hath put before his notes on the Metamorphosis of Ovid. ‘Of modern writers, I have received the greatest light from Geraldus, Pontanus, Ficinus, Vives, Comes, Scaliger, Sabinus, Pierius, and the crown of the latter, the Viscount of St. Albans.’
“It is true, the design of this book was instruction in natural and civil matters, either couched by the ancients under those fictions, or rather made to seem to be so by his lordship’s wit, in the opening and applying of them. But because the first ground of it is poetical story, therefore, let it have this place till a fitter be found for it.”
The author of Bacon’s Life, in the _Biographia Britannica_, says:— “That he might relieve himself a little from the severity of these studies, and, as it were, amuse himself with erecting a magnificent pavilion, while his great palace of philosophy was building, he composed and sent abroad, in 1610, his celebrated treatise of the Wisdom of the Ancients, in which he showed that none had studied them more closely, was better acquainted with their beauties, or had pierced deeper into their meaning.
There have been very few books published, either in this or any other nation, which either deserved or met with more general applause than this, and scarce any that are like to retain it longer, for in this performance Sir Francis Bacon gave a singular proof of his capacity to please all parties in literature, as in his political conduct he stood fair with all the parties in the nation. The admirers of antiquity were charmed with this discourse, which seems expressly calculated to justify their admiration; and, on the other hand, their opposites were no less pleased with a piece from which they thought they could demonstrate that the sagacity of a modern genius had found out much better meanings for the ancients than ever were meant by them.”
And Mallet, in his Life of Bacon, says:— “In 1610 he published another treatise, entitled, Of the Wisdom of the Ancients. This work bears the same stamp of an original and inventive genius with his other performances. Resolving not to tread in the steps of those who had gone before him, men, according to his own expression, not learned beyond certain commonplaces, he strikes out a new tract for himself, and enters into the most secret recesses of this wild and shadowy region, so as to appear new on a known and beaten subject. Upon the whole, if we cannot bring ourselves readily to believe that there is all the physical, moral, and political meaning veiled under those fables of antiquity, which he has discovered in them, we must own that it required no common penetration to be mistaken with so great an appearance of probability on his side. Though it still remains doubtful whether the ancients were so knowing as he attempts to show they were, the variety and depth of his own knowledge are, in that very attempt, unquestionable.”
In the year 1619 this tract was translated by Sir Arthur Gorges.
Prefixed to the work are two letters; the one to the Earl of Salisbury, the other to the University of Cambridge, which Gorges omits, and dedicates his translation to the high and illustrious princess the Lady Elizabeth of Great Britain, Duchess of Baviare, Countess Palatine of Rheine, and chief electress of the empire.
This translation, it should be noted, was published during the life of Lord Bacon by a great admirer of his works.
The editions of this work with which I am acquainted are:— Year. Language. Printer. Place. Size.
1609 Latin, R. Barker, London, 12mo.
NOTICE OF FRANCIS BACON.
Francis Bacon, the subject of the following memoir, was the youngest son of highly remarkable parents. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, was an eminent lawyer, and for twenty years Keeper of the Seals and Privy Counsellor to Queen Elizabeth. Sir Nicholas was styled by Camden _sacris conciliis alterum columen_; he was the author of some unpublished discourses on law and politics, and of a commentary on the minor prophets. He discharged the duties of his high office with exemplary propriety and wisdom; he preserved through life the integrity of a good man, and the moderation and simplicity of a great one.
He had inscribed over the entrance of his hall, at Gorhambury, the motto, _mediocria firma_; and when the Queen, in a progress, paid him a visit there, she remarked to him that his house was too small for him. “Madam,” answered the Lord Keeper, “my house is well, but it is you that have made me too great for my house.” This anecdote has been preserved by his son,[3] who, had he as carefully retained the lesson of practical wisdom it contained, might have avoided the misfortunes and sorrows of his checkered life.
Bacon’s mother, Anne Cooke, was the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to King Edward the Sixth; like the young ladies of her time, like Lady Jane Grey, like Queen Elizabeth, she received an excellent classical education; her sister, Lady Burleigh, was pronounced by Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeth’s preceptor, to be, with the exception of Lady Jane Grey, the best Greek scholar among the young women of England.[4] Anne Cooke, the future Lady Bacon, corresponded in Greek with Bishop Jewel, and translated from the Latin this divine’s _Apologia_; a task which she performed so well that it is said the good prelate could not discover an inaccuracy or suggest an alteration. She also translated from the Italian a volume of sermons on fate and freewill, written by Bernardo Ochino, an Italian reformer. Francis Bacon, the youngest of five sons, inherited the classical learning and taste of both his parents.
He was born at York House, in the Strand, London, on the 22d of January, 1560-61. His health, when he was a boy, was delicate; a circumstance which may perhaps account for his early love of sedentary pursuits, and probably the early gravity of his demeanor. Queen Elizabeth, he tells us, took particular delight in “trying him with questions,” when he was quite a child, and was so much pleased with the sense and manliness of his answers that she used jocularly to call him “her young Lord Keeper of the Seals.” Bacon himself relates that while he was a boy, the Queen once asked him his age; the precocious courtier readily replied that he “was just two years younger than her happy reign.” He is said, also, when very young, to have stolen away from his playfellows in order to investigate the cause of a singular echo in St.
James’s Fields, which attracted his attention.
Until the age of thirteen he remained under the tuition of his accomplished mother, aided by a private tutor only; under their care he attained the elements of the classics, that education preliminary to the studies of the University. At thirteen he was sent to Trinity College, Cambridge, where his father had been educated. Here he studied diligently the great models of antiquity, mathematics, and philosophy, worshipped, however, but indevoutly at the shrine of Aristotle, whom, according to Rawley, his chaplain and biographer, he already derided “for the unfruitfulness of the way,—being only strong for disputation, but barren of the production of works for the life of man.” He remained three years at this seat of learning, without, however, taking a degree at his departure.
When he was but sixteen years old he began his travels, the indispensable end of every finished education in England. He repaired to Paris, where he resided some time under the care of Sir Amyas Paulet, the English minister at the court of France.
Here he invented an ingenious method of writing in cipher; an art which he probably cultivated with a view to a diplomatic career.
He visited several of the provinces of France and of the towns of Italy. Italy was then the country in which human knowledge in all its branches was most successfully cultivated. It is related by Signor Cancellieri that Bacon, when at Rome, presented himself as a candidate to the Academy of the _Lincei_, and was not admitted.[5] He remained on the continent for three years, until his father’s death, in 1580.
The melancholy event, which bereft him of his parent, at the age of nineteen, was fatal to his prospects. His father had intended to purchase an estate for his youngest son, as he had done for his other sons; but he dying before this intention was realized, the money was equally divided between all the children; so that Francis inherited but one fifth of that fortune intended for him alone. He was the only one of the sons that was left unprovided for. He had now “to study to live,” instead of “living to study.” He wished, to use his own language, “to become a true pioneer in that mine of truth which lies so deep.” He applied to the government for a provision which his father’s interest would easily have secured him, and by which he might dispense with a profession. The Queen must have looked with favor upon the son of a minister, who had served her faithfully for twenty long years, and upon a young man whom, when he was a child, she had caressed, she had distinguished by the appellation of her “young Lord Keeper.” But Francis Bacon was abandoned, and perhaps opposed by the colleague and nearest friend of his father, the brother-in-law of his mother, his maternal uncle, Lord Burleigh, then Prime Minister, who feared for his son the rivalry of his all-talented nephew. It is a trick common to envy and detraction, to convert a man’s very qualities into their concomitant defects; and because Bacon was a great thinker, he was represented as unfit for the active duties of business, as “a man rather of show than of depth,” as “a speculative man, indulging himself in philosophical reveries, and calculated more to perplex than to promote public business.”[6] Thus was the future ornament of his country and of mankind sacrificed to Robert, afterwards Sir Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, of whose history fame has learned but little, save the execution of Essex and Mary Queen of Scots, the name, and this petty act of mean jealousy of his father! In the disposal of patronage and place, acts and even motives of this species are not so unfrequent as the world would appear to imagine. In all ages, it is to be feared, many and great, as in Shakspeare’s time, are, the spurns That patient merit of th’ unworthy takes.
It is, however, but justice to the morals of Lord Burleigh, to add that he was insensible to literary merit; he thought a hundred pounds too great a reward to be given to Spenser for what he termed “an old song,” for so he denominated the _Faery Queen_.
Bacon then selected the law as his profession; and in 1580 he was entered of Gray’s Inn;[7] he resisted the temptations of his companions and friends, (for his company was much courted), and diligently pursued the study he had chosen; but he did not at this time entirely lose sight of his philosophical speculations, for he then published his _Temporis partus maximus_, or _The Greatest Birth of Time_. This work, notwithstanding its pompous title, was unnoticed or rather fell stillborn from the press; the sole trace of it is found in one of his letters to Father Fulgentio.
In 1586, he was called to the bar; his practice there appears to have been limited, although not without success; for the Queen and the Court are said to have gone to hear him when he was engaged in any celebrated cause. He was, at this period of his life, frequently admitted to the Queen’s presence and conversation. He was appointed her Majesty’s Counsel Extraordinary,[8] but he had no salary and small fees.
In 1592, his uncle, the Lord Treasurer, procured for him the reversion of the registrarship of the Star Chamber, worth sixteen hundred pounds (forty thousand francs) a year; but the office did not become vacant till twenty years after, so that, as Bacon justly observes, “it might mend his prospects, but did not fill his barns.”
A parliament was summoned in 1593, and Bacon was returned to the House of Commons, for the County of Middlesex; he distinguished himself here as a speaker. “The fear of every man who heard him,” says his contemporary, Ben Jonson, “was lest he should make an end.” He made, however, on one occasion a speech which much displeased the Queen and Court. Elizabeth directed the Lord Keeper to intimate to him that he must expect neither favor nor promotion; the repentant courtier replied in writing, that “her Majesty’s favor was dearer to him than his life.”[9] In the following year the situation of Solicitor-General[10] became vacant. Bacon ardently aspired to it. He applied successively to Lord Burleigh, his uncle, to Lord Puckering, his father’s successor, to the Earl of Essex, their rival, and finally to the Queen herself, accompanying his letters, as was the custom of the times, with a present, a jewel.[11] But once more he saw mediocrity preferred, and himself rejected. A Serjeant Fleming was appointed her Majesty’s Solicitor-General. Bacon, overwhelmed by this disappointment, wished to retire from public life, and to reside abroad. “I hoped,” said he in a letter to Sir Robert Cecil, “her Majesty would not be offended that, not able to endure the sun, I fled into the shade.”
The Earl of Essex, whose mind, says Mr. Macaulay, “naturally disposed to admiration of all that is great and beautiful, was fascinated by the genius and the accomplishments of Bacon,”[12] had exerted every effort in Bacon’s behalf; to use his own language, he “spent all his power, might, authority, and amity;” he now sought to indemnify him, and, with royal munificence, presented him with an estate of the value of nearly two thousand pounds, a sum worth perhaps four or five times the amount in the money of our days. If anything could enhance the benefaction, it was the delicacy with which it was conferred, or, as Bacon himself expresses it, “with so kind and noble circumstances as the manner was worth more than the matter.”
Bacon published his _Essays_ in 1597; he considered them but as the “recreations of his other studies.” The idea of them was probably first suggested by Montaigne’s _Essais_, but there is little resemblance between the two works beyond the titles. The first edition contained but ten Essays, which were shorter than they now are. The work was reprinted in 1598, with little or no variation; again in 1606; and in 1612 there was a fourth edition, etc. However, he afterwards, he says, “enlarged it both in number and weight;” but it did not assume its present form until the ninth edition, in 1625, that is, twenty-eight years after its first publication, and one year before the death of the author. It appeared under the new title of _The Essaies or Covnsels Civill and Morall, of Francis Lo. Vervlam,_ _Viscovnt St. Alban.
Newly enlarged._ This is not followed by the _Religious Meditations, Places of Perswasion and Disswasion, seene and allowed_. The _Essays_ were soon translated into Italian with the title of _Saggi Morali del Signore Francesco Bacono, Cavagliero Inglese, Gran Cancelliero d’ Inghilterra_. This translation was dedicated to Cosmo de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany; and was reprinted in London in 1618. Of the three Essays added after Bacon’s decease, two of them, _Of a King_ and _Of Death_, are not genuine; the _Fragment of an Essay on Fame_ alone is Bacon’s.
In this same year (1597) he again took his seat in Parliament. He soon made ample amends for his opposition speech in the previous session; but this time he gained the favor of the Court without forfeiting his popularity in the House of Commons.
He now thought of strengthening his interest, or increasing his fortune, by a matrimonial connection; and he sought the hand of a rich widow, Lady Hatton, his second cousin; but here he was again doomed to disappointment; a preference was given to his old rival, the Attorney-General, Sir Edward Coke, notwithstanding the “seven objections to him—his six children and himself.” But although Bacon was perhaps unaware of it, the rejection of his suit was one of the happiest events of his life; for the eccentric manners and violent temper of the lady rendered her a torment to all around her, and probably most of all to her husband. In reality, as has been wittily observed, the lady was doubly kind to him; “she rejected him, and she accepted his enemy.”
Another mortification awaited him at this period. A relentless creditor, a usurer, had him arrested for a debt of three hundred pounds, and he was conveyed to a spunging-house, where he was confined for a few days, until arrangements could be made to satisfy the claim or the claimant.
We now arrive at a painfully sad point in the life of Bacon; a dark foul spot, which should be hidden forever, did not history, like the magistrate of Egypt that interrogated the dead, demand that the truth, the whole truth, should be told.
We have seen that between Bacon and the Earl of Essex, all was disinterested affection on the part of the latter; the Earl employed his good offices for him, exerted heart and soul to insure his success as Solicitor-General, and, on Bacon’s failure, conferred on him a princely favor, a gift of no ordinary value.
When Essex’s fortunes declined, and the Earl fell into disgrace, Bacon endeavored to mediate between the Queen and her favorite. The case became hopeless. Essex left his command in Ireland without leave, was ordered in confinement, and after a long imprisonment and trial before the Privy Council, he was liberated. Irritated by the refusal of a favor he solicited, he was betrayed into reflections on the Queen’s age and person, which were never to be forgiven, and he engaged in a conspiracy to seize on the Queen, and to settle a new plan of government. On the failure of this attempt, he was arrested, committed to the Tower, and brought to trial for high treason before the House of Peers. During his long captivity, who does not expect to see Bacon, his friend, a frequent visitor in his cell? Before the two tribunals, can we fail to meet Bacon, his counsel, at his side? We trace Bacon at Court, where, he assures us, after Elizabeth’s death, that he endeavored to appease and reconcile the Queen; but the place was too distant from the prison: for he never visited there his fallen friend.
At the first trial, Bacon did indeed make his appearance, but as “her Majesty’s Counsel extraordinary,” not for the defence, but for the prosecution of the prisoner. But he may be expected at least to have treated him leniently? He admits he did not, on account, as he tells us, of the “superior duty he owed to the Queen’s fame and honor in a public proceeding.” But hitherto, the Earl’s liberty alone had been endangered; now, his life is at stake. Do not the manifold favors, the munificent benefactions all arise in the generous mind of Bacon? Does he not waive all thought of interest and promotion and worldly honor to devote himself wholly to the sacred task of saving his patron, benefactor, and friend? Her Majesty’s Counsel extraordinary appeared in the place of the Solicitor-General, to reply to Essex’s defence; he compared the accused first to Cain, then to Pisistratus. The Earl made a pathetic appeal to his judges; Bacon showed he had not answered his objections, and compared him to the Duke of Guise, the most odious comparison he could have instituted. Essex was condemned; the Queen wavered in her resolution to execute him; his friend’s intercession might perhaps have been able to save Essex from an ignominious death.
Did Bacon, in his turn, “spend all his power, might, and amity?” The Queen’s Counsel extraordinary might have offended his sovereign by his importunity, and have been forgotten in the impending vacancy of the office of Solicitor-General! Essex died on the scaffold. But the execution rendered the Queen unpopular, and she was received with mournful silence when she appeared in public. She ordered a pamphlet to be written to justify the execution; she made choice of Bacon as the writer; the courtier did not decline the task, but published _A Declaration of the Practices and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert, late Earle of Essex and his Complices, against her Maiestie and her Kingdoms_. This faithless friend, to use the language of Macaulay, “exerted his professional talents to shed the Earl’s blood, and his literary talents to blacken the Earl’s memory.”
The memory of Essex suffered but little from the attack of the pamphlet; the base pamphleteer’s memory is blackened forever, and to his fair name of “the wisest, brightest,” has been appended the “meanest of mankind.” But let us cast a pall over this act, this moral murder, perpetrated by the now degraded orator, degraded philosopher, the now most degraded of men.
Elizabeth died in 1601; and before the arrival of James, in England, Bacon wrote him a pedantic letter, probably to gratify the taste of the pedant king; but he did not forget in it, “his late dear sovereign Mistress—a princess happy in all things, but most happy—in such a successor.”
Bacon solicited the honor of knighthood, a distinction much lavished at this period. At the King’s coronation, he knelt down in company with above three hundred gentlemen; but “he rose Sir Francis.” He sought the hand of a rich alderman’s daughter, Miss Barnham, who consented to become Lady Bacon.
The Earl of Southampton, Shakspeare’s generous patron and friend, who had been convicted of high treason in the late reign, now received the King’s pardon. This called to all men’s minds the fate of the unhappy Earl of Essex, and of his odiously ungrateful accuser; the latter unadvisedly published the _Sir Francis Bacon, his Apologie in certaine imputations concerning the late Earle of Essex_; a defence which, in the estimation of one of his biographers, Lord Campbell, has injured him more with posterity than all the attacks of his enemies.
In the new Parliament, he represented the borough of Ipswich; he spoke frequently, and obtained the good graces of the King by the support he gave to James’s favorite plan of a union of England and Scotland; a measure by no means palatable to the King’s new subjects.
The object of all his hopes, the price, perhaps, of his conduct to Essex, seemed in 1606 to be within his reach; but he was once more to be disappointed. His old enemy, Sir Edward Coke, prevented the vacancy.
The following year, however, after long and humiliating solicitation, he attained the office to which he had so long aspired, and was appointed Solicitor-General to the Crown.
Official advancement was now the object nearest his heart, and he longed to be Attorney-General.[13] In 1613, by a master stroke of policy, he created a vacancy for himself as Attorney-General, and managed at the same time to disserve his old enemy, Coke, by getting him preferred in rank, but at the expense of considerable pecuniary loss.
After his new appointment, he was reëlected to his seat in the House of Commons; he had gained so much popularity there, that the House admitted him, although it resolved to exclude future Attorneys-General; a resolution rescinded by later Parliaments.
The Attorney-General, as may be supposed, did not lack zeal in his master’s service and for his master’s prerogative. One case, in particular, was atrocious. An aged clergyman, named Peacham, was prosecuted for high treason for a sermon which he had neither preached nor published; the unfortunate old man was apprehended, put to the torture in presence of the Attorney-General, and as the latter himself tells us, was examined “before torture, between torture, and after torture,” although Bacon must have been fully aware that the laws of England did not sanction torture to extort confession. Bacon tampered with the judges, and obtained a conviction; but the government durst not carry the sentence into execution. Peacham languished in prison till the ensuing year, when Providence rescued him from the hands of human justice.
In 1616, Bacon was offered the formal promise of the Chancellorship, or an actual appointment as Privy Councillor; he was too prudent not to prefer an appointment to a promise, and he was accordingly nominated to the functions of member of the Privy Council. His present leisure enabled him to prosecute vigorously his _Novum Organum_, but he turned aside to occupy himself with a proposition for the amendment of the laws of England, on which Lord Campbell, assuredly the most competent of judges, passes a high encomium.
At length, in 1617, Sir Francis Bacon attained the end of the ambition of his life, he became Lord Keeper of the Seals, with the functions, though not the title, of Lord High Chancellor of England. His promotion to this dignity gave general satisfaction; his own university, Cambridge, congratulated him; Oxford imitated the example; the world expected a perfect judge, formed from his own model in his Essay of Judicature. He took his seat in the Court of Chancery with the utmost pomp and parade.
The Lord Keeper now endeavored to “feed fat the ancient grudge” he bore Coke. He deprived him of the office of Chief Justice, and erased his name from the list of privy councillors. Coke imagined a plan of raising his falling fortunes; he projected a marriage between his daughter by his second wife, a very rich heiress, and Sir John Villiers, the brother of Buckingham, the King’s favorite. Bacon was alarmed, wrote to the King, and used expressions of disparagement towards the favorite, his new patron, to whom he was indebted for the Seals he held. The King and his minion were equally indignant; and they did not conceal from him their resentment. On the return of the court, Bacon hastened to the residence of Buckingham; being denied admittance, he waited two whole days in the ante-chamber with the Great Seal of England in his hand. When at length he obtained access, the Lord Keeper threw himself and the Great Seal on the ground, kissed the favorite’s feet, and vowed never to rise till he was forgiven! It must after this have been difficult indeed for him to rise again in the world’s esteem or his own.
Bacon was made to purchase at a dear price his reinstatement in the good graces of Buckingham. The favorite constantly wrote to the judge in behalf of one of the parties, and in the end, says Lord Campbell, intimated that he was to dictate the decree. Nor did Bacon once remonstrate against this unwarrantable interference on the part of the man to whom he had himself recommended “by no means to interpose himself, either by word or letter in any cause depending on any court of justice.” The Lord Keeper received soon after, in 1618, the reward of his “many faithful services” by the higher title of Lord High Chancellor of England, and by the peerage with the name of Baron of Verulam.
The new Minister of Justice lent himself with his wonted complaisance to a most outrageous act of injustice, which Macaulay stigmatizes as a “dastardly murder,” that of the execution of Sir Walter Raleigh, under a sentence pronounced sixteen years before; Sir Walter having been in the interval invested with the high command of Admiral of the fleet.
Such an act it was the imperative duty of the first magistrate of the realm not to promote, but to resist to the full extent of his power; and the Chancellor alone could issue the warrant for the execution!
In 1620, he published what is usually considered his greatest work, his _Novum Organum_ (New Instrument or Method), which forms the second part of the _Instauratio Magna_ (Great Restoration of the Sciences). This work had occupied Bacon’s leisure for nearly thirty years. Such was the care he bestowed on it, that Rawley, his chaplain and biographer, states that he had seen about twelve autograph copies of it, corrected and improved until it assumed the shape in which it appeared. Previous to the publication of the _Novum Organum_, says the illustrious Sir John Herschel, “natural philosophy, in any legitimate and extensive sense of the word, could hardly be said to exist.”[14] It cannot be expected that a work destined completely to change the state of science, we had almost said of nature, should not be assailed by that prejudice which is ever ready to raise its loud but unmeaning voice against whatever is new, how great or good soever it may be. Bacon’s doctrine was accused of being calculated to produce “dangerous revolutions,” to “subvert governments and the authority of religion.” Some called on the present age and posterity to rise high in their resentment against “the Bacon-faced generation,” for so were the experimentalists termed. The old cry of irreligion, nay, even of atheism, was raised against the man who had said: “I would rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.”[15] But Bacon had to encounter the prejudices even of the learned. Cuffe, the Earl of Essex’s secretary, a man celebrated for his attainments, said of the _Instauratio Magna_, “a fool could not have written such a book, and a wise man would not.” King James said, it was “like the peace of God, that surpasseth all understanding.” And even Harvey, the discoverer of the circulation of the blood, said to Aubrey: “Bacon is no great philosopher; he writes philosophy like a Lord Chancellor.” Rawley, his secretary and his biographer, laments, some years after his friend’s death, that “his fame is greater and sounds louder in foreign parts abroad than at home in his own nation; thereby verifying that divine sentence: A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country and in his own house.” Bacon was for some time without honor “in his own country and in his own house.” But truth on this, as on all other occasions, triumphs in the end. Bacon’s assailants are forgotten; Bacon will be remembered with gratitude and veneration forever.
He was again, in 1621, promoted in the peerage to be Viscount Saint-Albans; his patent particularly celebrating his “integrity in the administration of justice.”
In this same year the Parliament assembled. The House of Commons first voted the subsidies demanded by the Crown, and next proceeded, as was usual in those times, to the redress of grievances. A committee of the House was appointed to inquire into “the abuses of Courts of Justice.”
A report of this committee charged the Lord Chancellor with corruption, and specified two cases; in the first of which Aubrey, a suitor in his court, stated that he had presented the Lord Chancellor with a hundred pounds; and Egerton, another suitor in his court, with four hundred pounds in addition to a former piece of plate of the value of fifty pounds; in both cases decisions had been given against the parties whose presents had been received. (Lord Campbell asserts that in the case of Egerton both parties had made the Chancellor presents.)[16] His enemies, it is said, estimated his illicit gains at a hundred thousand pounds; a statement which, it is more than probable, is greatly exaggerated.[17] “I never had,” said Bacon in his defence, “bribe or reward in my eye or thought when I pronounced sentence or order.” This is an acknowledgment of the fact, and perhaps an aggravation of the offence. He then addressed “an humble submission” to the House, a kind of general admission, in which he invoked as a plea of excuse _vitia temporis_.