PREFACE. Three of the most interesting, and, in some respects, most influential writers of earlier English prose, were Johnson, Addison and Bacon. The last is having his revival in America through his Essays, which are being adopted as a text-book in English literature in many of our Colleges and High Schools. A comparatively recent life of Bacon attracted the writer's attention in one of these nurseries of American citizenship, and he was impressed with the hero-worship prominent in every paragraph, — how admiration of the philosopher's intellect made the biographer blind to the man's frailty, how every comment seemed to be a compromise with, or apology for, just such individual and official corruption as is now awakening the American mind to a just appreciation of public and private honesty and integrity. Impressed with the idea that there is room for a sketch of this great type of official bribe-takers, the writer has exhibited this extraordinary man climbing to the Wool-sack and descending to the prison-cell, through |