.... how he should be reverenced by a L(ord) Chancellor, if I were :-princelike. To take notes, in tables, when I attend the Council; and sometimes to move out of a memorial, shewed and seen. To have particular occasions, fit and grateful and continual, to maintain private speech with every the great persons, and sometimes drawing more than one of them together, ex imitatione Attorney). This especially in public places and without care or affectation." .. A man so supple and conciliatory, endeavouring to introduce into business and politics the ductility that he had found, or thought he had found, invincible in natural science, was destined to inevitable failure as a Statesman. It was a part of Bacon's theory of life, as well as a result of his disposition and training, that a man must not be persistent in aiming at one object, if he wishes to prosper in the world. He must "avoid repulse;" and "in every particular action, if he cannot obtain his wishes in the best degree, he must be satisfied if he can succeed in a second or even a third; and, if he cannot obtain his wishes at all in that particular, then he must turn the labour spent in it to some other end. He must imitate Nature, which doeth nothing in vain. For nothing is more impolitic than to be entirely bent on one action."1 Even if Bacon had had the insight of a Prophet, he could have done nothing with so pliant and selfseeking a nature. He wanted, not only strength of convictions, but pertinacity in maintaining and imparting them. Like St. Paul he could be all things to all men; but he had not the Pauline art of being instant "in season and out of season" for any policy except that which would commend him to the King : and such political intentions as he had, vanished in a thousand petty attempts to lift himself into a position where he might carry his intentions into effect. But his failure was intellectual and political as well as moral. Faced by a difficult but inevitable problem he could do nothing but endeavour to evade it as insoluble; and his only remedies against the Coming Revolution were the spendthrift policy of procrastination by recourse to the distractions of foreign warfare and the philosopher's dream of an ideal King. 1 De Augmentis, viii. 2; Spedding, Works, v. 74. 21 BACON'S PRIVATE PLANS We know from Bacon's own testimony, that on the attainment (June, 1607) of the office for which he had sued so long, he was seized with a temporary melancholy.1 "I have found now twice, upon amendment of my fortune, disposition to melancholy and distaste, especially the same happening against the long vacation when company failed and business both. For, upon my Solicitor's place, I grew indisposed and inclined to superstition." Most restless men and hard workers, if they have no children and no taste for field-sports, are liable to periods of depression in the intervals of hard work; but Francis Bacon might have other reasons for dejection. He was then in his forty-seventh year, he who, while still in youth, had written the Greatest Birth of Time, and taken all knowledge to be his province:and what results had he to show? The ardour of the chase for the Solicitorship having disappeared, he had leisure in the vacation to review his position and to contrast his philosophic results with his philosophic purposes; and it was perhaps under this stimulus that he, about this time (1607), settled the plan of his Instauratio Magna, or Great Renewal of Learning. The Advancement of Learning was but a popular work, treating in general terms of the excellency of knowledge, and noting in detail the successes and deficiencies in the present state of knowledge; and it was intended to prepare the minds of its readers to give a favourable reception to that new philosophy which was to interpret nature, and to govern nature by interpreting it. Bacon now desired to give some specimens of the true philosophic method applied to some particular work-an investigation, for example, into the nature of heat. But, as an introduction to the account of this investigation, some preface and statement of general principles would be requisite; and such a preface Bacon about this time composed in Latin, under the title of Cogitata et Visa, i.e. Thoughts and Judgments. A year passed away and brought fresh prosperity with it. On the 16th July, 1608, died Mill the Clerk of the Star Chamber, and Bacon on the same day took the oath for the office for which he had waited nineteen years. As the clerkship was worth £2,000 a year, he was now a rich man, with an annual income of nearly £5,000, that is, about £20,000 of our money. He had now wealth enough (even without his Solicitorship which he valued at only £1,000 a year) to dispense with practice, and he might have easily devoted himself to those contemplative ends" which, as he had told his uncle Burghley nineteen years ago, were as vast as his "civil ends" were moderate. The choice therefore between a student's life and a civil life at this time lay before him. Once more, as had befallen him on his promotion to the Solicitorship, a melancholy settles on this restless, sanguine spirit. 1 Spedding, Life, iv. 79. • So-called from the fact that the treatise, and each section of the treatise, is introduced with the preamble, "Francis Bacon thought thus" (see below, § 50). In theory Bacon depreciated all "earthly hope," as vain, frothy, and seductive; but in practice he was never happy except when hoping and working for what would have seemed to ordinary minds beyond all hope. In this mood he sits down on the 25th of July, 1608, to review his position and his plans. Beginning with a determination "to make a stock of £2,000 always in readiness for bargains and great occasions" and to set himself "in credit for borrowing," he passes to the question of the best means to attain influence with the King and Council.1 Then follow notes which show that Bacon wished to displace Hobart, the Attorney-general, that he might step into his office : "To have in mind and use the Attorney's weakness"-followed by some prepared expressions of depreciation: "The coldest examiner; weak in Gunter's cause; weak with the judges; too full of cases and distinctions; nibbling solemnly; he distinguisheth, but apprehendeth not; " and again, "To win credit comparate to the Attorney by being more short, round and resolute." After some notes on the best means for retaining his hold on Salisbury (Cecil), on the effect of certain medicines on his constitution, and on the double policy of contenting the people and at the same time filling the royal exchequer, he concludes with jottings relating to the arrangement of his books and papers. 1 This, and other extracts from the Commentarius Solutus relating to Bacon's political schemes, have been quoted fully above (see pp. 131-135, 144-150). The 25th of July having been devoted to the improvement of his fortunes, he devotes the following day to the New Philosophy. Since nothing can be done without experiments, it is desirable to secure scientific experimenters, and patrons of science, and he jots down a list; Russell the mineralogist; through him perhaps Sir David Murray his friend; and by him finally the Prince (Henry); the mathematician Harriot, and his patron, the Earl of Northumberland; Sir Walter Raleigh; also the Archbishop of Canterbury being single and "glorious," i.e. fond of fame; then Bishop Andrews (one of his most intimate friends) being "single, rich, sickly;" perhaps also learned men beyond the seas. He must finish his three tables of classified phenomena of heat, cold, and sound, as also his Aphorisms; his Advancement of Learning must be translated into Latin; his Cogitata et Visa circulated privately and discreetly, with choice “ut videbitur.” Next comes a sketch of a popular discourse on his favourite text plus ultra (i.e. there is a New World beyond the intellectual pillars of Hercules which were once supposed to show the ne plus ultra). The reception given to the Advancement of Learning had probably taught Bacon that the minds of men were still too servilely subject to the authority of the "ostentatious" Greek Philosophy. He therefore sketches a project of a work "discoursing scornfully of the philosophy of the Grecians, with some better respect to the Egyptians, Persians, Chaldees, and the utmost antiquity and the mysteries of the poets." This might be written in the character of an Elder discoursing to his sons; hence a note, "Query, of an oration 'ad filios,' delightful, sublime, and mixed with elegancy, affection, novelty of conceit, and yet sensible." 2 Then, after projecting a History of Marvels, and a History Mechanic (i.e. of experiments and observations of all mechanical arts,) he makes a note concerning "laying for a place to command wits and pens, Westminster, Eton, Winchester specially Trinity College in Cambridge, St. John's in Cambridge, Magdalene College in Oxford, and bespeaking this betimes with the King, my Lord Archbishop, my Lord Treasurer." Following up the project of "discoursing scornfully," he makes this entry: "taking a greater confidence and authority in discourses of this nature, tanquam sui certus et de alto despiciens," ("like a man certain of his position and looking down from a height on others.") 1 Essays, liv. 34. 2 This project found fulfilment in the Redargutio Philosophiarum (sce § 51). Now, after a query on "younger scholars in the Universities,' he passes to a sketch of the ideal College for Inventors (such a sketch as he amplified some years afterwards in the New Atlantis), with its endowments, allowances for travelling-students and for experiments; its library and "inginery; " its rewards and penalties; its vaults, furnaces, and terraces for insulation; wherein, with characteristic sanguineness and love of stately effect, he does not omit "two galleries for inventors past, and spaces or bases for inventors to come." This section concludes with a note of an "endeavour to abate the price of professing sciences" (comp. Advancement of Learning, ii. 1, 8.) "and to bring in estimation Philosophy or Universality," i.e. the knowledge of the Axioms common to all sciences. He concludes his day's work by setting down fifteen heads for a scheme of legitimate or complete investigation (inquisitio legitima). All the entries on the next day (27 July) are devoted to a sketch of the complete investigation of Motion, in the course of which he enumerates more than twenty different kinds of motion, and assigns a number of phenomena to their several causal motions. But the following day (28 July) brings him back again from "contemplation" to the subjects with which he started, viz., "civil business" and the architecture of his own fortunes. He again notes the emptiness of the royal exchequer, resolves to finish his treatise "of the greatness of Britain with aspect to pol(icy)," and then proceeds to define that policy, the "foundation in this isle of a monarchy in the west, as an apt seat, state, people, for it; so civilising Ireland; further colonising the wild of Scotland, annexing the Low Countries." Next come some "forms" of wit, and repartees, and notes on Recusants. Then, once more recurring to the Attorney-general (Hobart) whom he wishes to supplant, he proposes to draw up certain legal compilations, and by showing them casually ("obiter") to the Lord Chancellor and Lord Treasurer, to convince them that he is specially fit for the Attorney's place, "and to make think they |