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unpublished discourses on law and politics, and of a commentary on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_.
How widely different from this is his own language! It is fair justice
to appeal from the judge to the tribunal of the philosopher and
moralist; it is appealing from Philip drunk to Philip sober; unhappily
it is likewise
to have the engineer
Hoist with his own petar.
He says, in his Essay of Great Place: “For corruption: do not only
bind thine own hands, or thy servant’s hands from taking, but bind
the hands of suitors from offering. For integrity used doth the one;
but integrity professed, and with a manifest detestation of bribery,
doth the other; and avoid not only the fault, but the suspicion.”[18]
He says again, in the same Essay: “Set it down to thyself, as well to
create good precedents as to follow them.”
But the allegation that it was a custom of the times requires
examination. It was a custom of the times in reality to make presents
to superiors. Queen Elizabeth received them as New Year’s gifts from
functionaries of all ranks, from her prime minister down to Charles
Smith, the dust-man (see note 1, page 7), and this custom probably
continued under her successor, and may have been applied to other high
functionaries, but it does not appear to have been in legitimate use
in the courts of judicature. Coke, himself Chief Justice, was Bacon’s
principal accuser; and, although an enemy, he has been said to have
conducted himself with moderation and propriety on this occasion only.
Lord Campbell, Chief Justice of the Court of Queen’s Bench, and author
of the _Lives of the Chancellors and Chief Justices of England_,
repels the plea, as inadmissible. It cannot be denied that if Bacon
extended the practice to the courts of justice, he has heaped coals
of fire on his head; for applied to his own case personally it would
be sufficiently odious; but what odium would not that man deserve who
should systematize, nay, legitimize a practice that must inevitably
poison the stream of justice at its fountain-head! What execration
could be too great, if that man were the most intelligent, the wisest
of his century, one of the most dignified in rank in the land, clad
in spotless ermine, the emblem of purity, in short, the Minister of
Justice!
The Lords resolved that Bacon should be called upon to put in a
particular answer to each of the special charges preferred against
him. The formal articles with proofs in support were communicated to
him. The House received the “confession and humble submission of me,
the Lord Chancellor.” In this document, Bacon acknowledges himself to
be guilty of corruption; and in reply to each special charge admits in
every instance the receipt of money or valuable things from the suitors
in his court; but alleging in some cases that it was after judgment,
or as New Year’s gifts, a custom of the times, or for prior services.
A committee of nine temporal and three spiritual lords was appointed
to ascertain whether it was he who had subscribed this document. The
committee repaired to his residence, were received in the hall where
he had been accustomed to sit as judge, and merely asked him if the
signature affixed to the paper they exhibited to him was his. He
passionately exclaimed: “My lords, it is my act, my hand, my heart. I
beseech your lordships to be merciful to a broken reed.” The committee
withdrew, overwhelmed with grief at the sight of such greatness so
fallen.
Four commissioners dispatched by the King demanded the Great Seal of
the Chancellor, confined to his bed by sickness and sorrow and want of
sustenance; for he refused to take any food. He hid his face in his
hand, and delivered up that Great Seal for the attainment of which he
“had sullied his integrity, had resigned his independence, had violated
the most sacred obligations of friendship and gratitude, had flattered
the worthless, had persecuted the innocent, had tampered with judges,
had tortured prisoners, had plundered suitors, had wasted on paltry
intrigues all the powers of the most exquisitely constructed intellect
that has ever been bestowed on any of the children of men.”[19]
All this he did to be Lord High Chancellor of England; and, had he not
been the unworthy minister of James, he might have been, to use the
beautiful language of Hallam, “the high-priest of nature.”
On the 3d of May, he was unanimously declared to be guilty, and he was
sentenced to a fine of forty thousand pounds, to be imprisoned in the
Tower during the King’s pleasure, to be incapable of holding any public
office, and of sitting in Parliament or of coming within the verge of
the court.[20] Such was the sentence pronounced on the man whom three
months before the King _delighted to honor_ for “his integrity in the
administration of justice.”
The fatal verdict affected his health so materially that the judgment
could not receive immediate execution; he could not be conveyed to
the Tower until the 31st of May; the following day he was liberated.
He repaired to the house of Sir John Vaughan, who held a situation in
the prince’s household.[21] He wished to retire to his own residence
at York House; but this was refused. He was ordered to proceed to his
seat at Gorhambury, whence he was not to remove, and where he remained,
though very reluctantly, till the ensuing spring.
The heavy fine was remitted. But as he had lived in great pomp, he had
economized naught from his legitimate or ill-gotten gains. As he was
now insolvent, a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year was bestowed
on him; from his estate and other revenues he derived thirteen hundred
pounds per annum more. On the 17th of October, his remaining penalties
were remitted. It cannot but strike the reader as a most remarkable
circumstance that, within eighteen months of the condemnation, all the
penalties were successively remitted. Would this induce the belief
that he was but the scape-goat of the court, that the condemnation was
purely political? It is, we believe, to be explained ostensibly by the
advanced age of Bacon, but really by the circumstance that the King’s
favorite, Buckingham, was an accomplice.
Bacon discovered, alas! when it was too late, that the talent God had
given him he had “misspent in things for which he was least fit;” or as
Thomson has beautifully expressed it:[22]—
Hapless in his choice,
Unfit to stand the civil storm of state,
And through the smooth barbarity of courts,
With firm, but pliant virtue, forward still
To urge his course; him for the studious shade
Kind Nature form’d; deep, comprehensive, clear,
Exact, and elegant; in one rich soul,
Plato, the Stagyrite and Tully join’d.
The great deliverer he!
It is gratifying to turn from the melancholy scenes exhibited by the
political life of Bacon, to behold him in his study in the deep search
of truth; no contrast is more striking than that between the chancellor
and the philosopher, or, as Macaulay has well termed it, “Bacon seeking
for truth, and Bacon seeking for the Seals—Bacon in speculation, and
Bacon in action.” From amidst clouds and darkness we emerge into the
full blaze and splendor of midday light.
We now find Bacon wholly devoting himself to the pursuits for which
nature adapted him, and from which no extent of occupation could
entirely detach him. The author redeemed the man; in the philosopher
and the poet there was no weakness, no corruption.
Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail
Or knock the breast; no weakness, no contempt,
Dispraise or blame, nothing but well and fair.
Here the writer yielded not to _vitia temporis_; but combated them with
might and main, with heart and soul.
In 1623, he published the _Life of Henry VII._ In a letter addressed
to the Queen of Bohemia with a copy, he says pathetically: “’Time was
I had honor without leisure, and now I have leisure without honor.”
But his honor without leisure had precipitated him into “bottomless
perdition;” his leisure without honor retrieved his name, and raised
him again to an unattainable height.
In the following year, he printed his Latin translation of the
_Advancement of Learning_, under the title of _De Dignitate et
Augmentis Scientiarum_.
This was not, however, a mere translation; for he made in it omissions
and alterations; and appears to have added about one third new matter;
in short, he remodelled it. His work, replete with poetry and beautiful
imagery, was received with applause throughout Europe. It was reprinted
in France in 1624, one year after its appearance in England. It was
immediately translated into French and Italian, and was published in
Holland, the great book-mart of that time, in 1645, 1650, and 1662.
In 1624, he solicited of the King a remission of the sentence, to the
end, says he, “that blot of ignominy may be removed from me and from
my memory with posterity.” The King granted him a full pardon. But he
never more took his seat in the House of Lords. When the new Parliament
met, after the accession of Charles the First, age, infirmity, and
tardy wisdom had extinguished the ambition of Baron Verulam, Viscount
St. Albans. When the writ of summons to the Parliament reached him, he
exclaimed: “I have done with such vanities!”
But the philosopher pursued his labor of love. He published new
editions of his writings, and translated them into Latin, from the
mistaken notion that in that language alone could they be rescued from
oblivion. His crabbed latinity is now read but by few, or even may be
said to be nearly forgotten; while his noble, majestic English is read
over the whole British empire, on which the sun never sets, is studied
and admired throughout the old world and the new, and it will be so by
generations still unborn; it will descend to posterity in company with
his contemporary, Shakspeare (whose name he never mentions), and will
endure as long as the great and glorious language itself; indeed, as he
foretold of his Essays, it “will live as long as books last.”
In the translation of his works into Latin, he was assisted by Rawley,
his future biographer, and his two friends, Ben Jonson, the poet, and
Hobbes, the philosopher.
He wrote for his “own recreation,” amongst very serious studies, a
_Collection of Apophthegms, New and Old_, said to have been dictated in
one rainy day, but probably the result of several “rainy days.” This
contains many excellent jocular anecdotes, and has been, perhaps, with
too much indulgence, pronounced by Macaulay to be the best jest-book in
the world.
He commenced a _Digest of the Laws of England_, but he soon
discontinued it, because it was “a work of assistance, and that which
he could not master by his own forces and pen.” James the First had not
sufficient elevation of mind to afford him the means of securing the
assistance he required.
He wrote his will with his own hand on the 19th of December, 1625. He
directs that he shall be interred in St. Michael’s Church, near St.
Albans: “There was my mother buried, and it is the parish church of
my mansion-house at Gorhambury.... For my name and memory, I leave it
to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next
ages.” This supreme act of filial piety towards his gifted mother is
affecting. Let no “uncharitable” word be uttered over his last solemn
behest; foreign nations and all ages will not refuse a tribute of
homage to his genius! Gassendi presents an analysis of his labors, and
pays a tribute of admiration to their author; Descartes has mentioned
him with encomium; Malebranche quotes him as an authority; Puffendorff
expressed admiration of him; the University of Oxford presented to him,
after his fall, an address, in which he is termed “a mighty Hercules,
who had by his own hand greatly advanced those pillars in the learned
world which by the rest of the world were supposed immovable.” Leibnitz
ascribed to him the revival of true philosophy; Newton had studied
him so closely that he adopted even his phraseology; Voltaire and
D’Alembert have rendered him popular in France. The modern philosophers
of all Europe regard him reverentially as the father of experimental
philosophy.
He attempted at this late period of his life a metrical translation
into English of the Psalms of David; although his prose is full of
poetry, his verse has but little of the divine art.
He again declined to take his seat as a peer in Charles’s second
Parliament; but the last stage of his life displayed more dignity and
real greatness than the “pride, pomp, and circumstance” of his high
offices and honors. The public of England and of “foreign nations”
forgot the necessity of “charitable speeches” and anticipated “the
next ages.” The most distinguished foreigners repaired to Gray’s Inn
to pay their respects to him. The Marquis d’Effiat, who brought over
to England the Princess Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles the
First, went to see him. Bacon, confined to his bed, but unwilling to
decline the visit, received him with the curtains drawn. “You resemble
the angels,” said the French minister to him, “we hear those beings
continually talked of; we believe them superior to mankind; and we
never have the consolation to see them.”
But in ill health and infirmity he continued his studies and
experiments; as it occurred to him that snow might preserve animal
substances from putrefaction as well as salt, he tried the experiment,
and stuffed a fowl with snow with his own hands. “The great apostle of
experimental philosophy was destined to become its martyr;” he took
cold. From his bed he dictated a letter to the Earl of Arundel, to
whose house he had been conveyed. “I was likely to have had the fortune
of Caïus Plinius the Elder, who lost his life by trying an experiment
about the burning of the Mount Vesuvius. For I was also desirous to
try an experiment or two touching the conservation and induration of
bodies. As for the experiment itself, it succeeded excellently well.”
He had, indeed, the fortune of Pliny the Elder; for he never recovered
from the effects of his cold, which brought on fever and a complaint of
the chest; and he expired on the 9th of April, 1626, in the sixty-sixth
year of his age. Thus died, a victim to his devotion to science,
Francis Bacon, whose noble death is an expiation of the errors of his
life, and who was, as has been justly observed, notwithstanding all his
faults, one of the greatest ornaments and benefactors of the human race.
No account has been preserved of his funeral; but probably it was
private. Sir Thomas Meautys, his faithful secretary, erected at his own
expense a monument to Bacon’s memory. Bacon is represented sitting,
reclining on his hand, and absorbed in meditation. The effigy bears the
inscription: _sic sedebat_.
The singular fact ought not to be omitted, that notwithstanding the
immense sums that had been received by him, legitimately or otherwise,
he died insolvent. The fault of his life had been that he never adapted
his expenses to his income; perhaps even he never calculated them.
To what irretrievable ruin did not this lead him? To disgrace and
dishonor, in the midst of his career; to insolvency at its end. His
love of worldly grandeur was uncontrollable, or at least uncontrolled.
“The virtue of prosperity is temperance,” says he himself; but this
virtue he did not possess. His stately bark rode proudly over the
waves, unmindful of the rocks; on one of these, alas! it split and
foundered.
Bacon was very prepossessing in his person; he was in stature above
the middle size; his forehead was broad and high, of an intellectual
appearance; his eye was lively and expressive; and his countenance bore
early the marks of deep thought.
It might be mentioned here with instruction to the reader, that few
men were more impressed than Bacon with the value of time, the most
precious element of life. He assiduously employed the smallest portions
of it; considering justly that the days, the hours, nay minutes of
existence require the greatest care at our hands; the weeks, months,
and years have been wisely said to take care of themselves. His
chaplain, Rawley, remarks: “_Nullum momentum aut temporis segmentum
perire et intercidere passus est_,” he suffered no moment nor fragment
of time to pass away unprofitably. It is this circumstance that
explains to us the great things he accomplished even in the most busy
part of his life.
The whole of Bacon’s biography has been admirably recapitulated by Lord
Campbell[23] in the following paragraph:—
“We have seen him taught his alphabet by his mother; patted
on the head by Queen Elizabeth; mocking the worshippers of
Aristotle at Cambridge; catching the first glimpses of his great
discoveries, and yet uncertain whether the light was from heaven;
associating with the learned and the gay at the court of France;
devoting himself to Bracton[24] and the Year Books in Gray’s
Inn; throwing aside the musty folios of the law to write a moral
Essay, to make an experiment in natural philosophy, or to detect
the fallacies which had hitherto obstructed the progress of
useful truth; contented for a time with taking “all knowledge for
his province;” roused from these speculations by the stings of
vulgar ambition; plying all the arts of flattery to gain official
advancement by royal and courtly favor; entering the House of
Commons, and displaying powers of oratory of which he had been
unconscious; being seduced by the love of popular applause, for
a brief space becoming a patriot; making amends, by defending
all the worst excesses of prerogative; publishing to the world
lucubrations on morals, which show the nicest perception of what
is honorable and beautiful as well as prudent, in the conduct
of life; yet the son of a Lord Keeper, the nephew of the prime
minister, a Queen’s counsel, with the first practice at the
bar, arrested for debt, and languishing in a spunging-house;
tired with vain solicitations to his own kindred for promotion,
joining the party of their opponent, and after experiencing the
most generous kindness from the young and chivalrous head of
it, assisting to bring him to the scaffold, and to blacken his
memory; seeking, by a mercenary marriage to repair his broken
fortunes; on the accession of a new sovereign offering up the
most servile adulation to a pedant whom he utterly despised;
infinitely gratified by being permitted to kneel down, with three
hundred others, to receive the honor of knighthood; truckling
to a worthless favorite with the most slavish subserviency that
he might be appointed a law-officer of the Crown; then giving
the most admirable advice for the compilation and emendation
of the laws of England, and helping to inflict torture on a
poor parson whom he wished to hang as a traitor for writing an
unpublished and unpreached sermon; attracting the notice of all
Europe by his philosophical works, which established a new era
in the mode of investigating the phenomena both of matter and
mind; basely intriguing in the meanwhile for further promotion,
and writing secret letters to his sovereign to disparage his
rivals; riding proudly between the Lord High Treasurer and Lord
Privy Seal, preceded by his mace-bearer and purse-bearer, and
followed by a long line of nobles and judges, to be installed
in the office of Lord High Chancellor; by and by, settling with
his servants the account of the bribes they had received for
him; a little embarrassed by being obliged, out of decency, the
case being so clear, to decide against the party whose money
he had pocketed, but stifling the misgivings of conscience by
the splendor and flattery which he now commanded; struck to the
earth by the discovery of his corruption; taking to his bed,
and refusing sustenance; confessing the truth of the charges
brought against him, and abjectly imploring mercy; nobly rallying
from his disgrace, and engaging in new literary undertakings,
which have added to the splendor of his name; still exhibiting
a touch of his ancient vanity, and, in the midst of pecuniary
embarrassment, refusing to ‘be stripped of his feathers;’[25]
inspired, nevertheless, with all his youthful zeal for science,
in conducting his last experiment of ‘stuffing a fowl with snow
to preserve it,’ which succeeded ‘excellently well,’ but brought
him to his grave; and, as the closing act of a life so checkered,
making his will, whereby, conscious of the shame he had incurred
among his contemporaries, but impressed with a swelling
conviction of what he had achieved for mankind, he bequeathed
his ‘name and memory to men’s charitable speeches, to foreign
nations, and the next ages.’”
After this brilliant recapitulation of the principal facts of Bacon’s
eventful life, there remains the difficult task of examining his
character as a writer and philosopher; and then of presenting some
observations on his principal works. As these subjects have occupied
the attention of the master minds and most elegant writers of England,
we shall unhesitatingly present the reader with the opinions of these,
the most competent judges in each special department.
But first, let the philosopher speak for himself.
The end and aim of the writings of Bacon are best described by himself,
as these descriptions may be gleaned from his various works. He taught,
to use his own language, the means, not of the “amplification of the
power of one man over his country, nor of the amplification of the
power of that country over other nations; but the amplification of the
power and kingdom of mankind over the world.”[26] “A restitution of
man to the sovereignty of nature.”[27] “The enlarging the bounds of
human empire to the effecting of all things possible.”[28] From the
enlargement of reason, he did not separate the growth of virtue; for he
thought that “truth and goodness were one, differing but as the seal
and the print, for truth prints goodness.”[29]
The art which Bacon taught, has been well said to be “the art of
inventing arts.”
The great qualities of his mind, as they are exhibited in his works,
have been well portrayed by the pen of Sir James Mackintosh. We
subjoin the opinion of this elegant writer in his own words:
“It is easy to describe his transcendent merit in general terms
of commendation: for some of his great qualities lie on the
surface of his writings. But that in which he most excelled all
other men, was in the range and compass of his intellectual
view—the power of contemplating many and distant objects
together, without indistinctness or confusion—which he himself
has called the discursive or comprehensive understanding. This
wide-ranging intellect was illuminated by the brightest Fancy
that ever contented itself with the office of only ministering
to Reason: and from this singular relation of the two grand
faculties of man, it has resulted, that his philosophy, though
illustrated still more than adorned by the utmost splendor of
imagery, continues still subject to the undivided supremacy of
intellect. In the midst of all the prodigality of an imagination
which, had it been independent, would have been poetical, his
opinions remained severely rational.
“It is not so easy to conceive, or at least to describe, other
equally essential elements of his greatness, and conditions of
his success. He is probably a single instance of a mind which,
in philosophizing, always reaches the point of elevation whence
the whole prospect is commanded, without ever rising to such
a distance as to lose a distinct perception of every part of
it.”[30]
Mr. Macaulay speaks of the following peculiarity of Bacon’s
understanding:[31]—
“With great minuteness of observation he had an amplitude
of comprehension such as has never yet been vouchsafed to
any other human being. The small fine mind of La Bruyère had
not a more delicate tact than the large intellect of Bacon.
The “Essays” contain abundant proofs that no nice feature of
character, no peculiarity in the ordering of a house, a garden,
or a court-masque, could escape the notice of one whose mind
was capable of taking in the whole world of knowledge. His
understanding resembled the tent which the fairy Paribanou gave
to prince Ahmed. Fold it, and it seemed a toy for the hand of the
lady. Spread it, and the armies of powerful sultans might repose
beneath its shade.
“In keenness of observation he has been equalled, though,
perhaps, never surpassed. But the largeness of his mind was all
his own. The glance with which he surveyed the intellectual
universe, resembled that which the archangel, from the golden
threshold of heaven, darted down into the new creation.
“Round he surveyed and well might, where he stood
So high above the circling canopy
Of night’s extended shade—from eastern point
Of Libra, to the fleecy star which bears
Andromeda far off Atlantic seas
Beyond the horizon.”
Bacon’s philosophy is, to use an expression of his own, “the servant
and interpreter of nature;” he cultivated it in the leisure left him by
the assiduous study and practice of the law and by the willing duties
of a courtier; it was rather the recreation than the business of his
life; “my business,” said he, “found rest in my contemplations;” but
his very recreations rendered him, according to Leibnitz, the father
of experimental philosophy, and, according to all, the originator of
all its results, of all later discoveries in chemistry and the arts, in
short, of all modern science and its applications.
Mr. Macaulay is of opinion that the two leading principles of his
philosophy are _utility_ and _progress_; that the ethics of his
inductive method are to do good, to do more and more good, to mankind.
Lord Campbell believes that a most perfect body of ethics might be made
out from the writings of Bacon.
The origin of his philosophy was the conviction with which he was
impressed of the insufficiency of that of the ancients, or rather of
that of Aristotle, which reigned with almost undisputed sway throughout
Europe. He reverenced antiquity for its great works, its great men;
but not because of its ancientness; he deemed its decrees worthy of
reverential consideration, but did not think they admitted of no
appeal; he was not a bigot to antiquity or a contemner of modern times.
He happily combated that undue and blind submission to the authority
of ancient times for the mere reason that they are older than our own,
alleging truly that “ANTIQUITAS SECULI JUVENTUS MUNDI, that our times
are the ancient times, when the world is ancient, and not those which
we account ancient, _ordine retrogrado_, by a computation backward from
ourselves.”[32]
Throwing off, then, all allegiance to antiquity, he appealed directly
from Aristotle to nature, from reasoning to experiment.
But let us invoke the testimony of an eminent philosopher, Sir John
Herschel:—
“By the discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, the
errors of the Aristotelian philosophy were effectually overturned
on a plain appeal to the facts of nature; but it remained to
show, on broad and general principles, how and why Aristotle
was in the wrong; to set in evidence the peculiar weakness of
his method of philosophizing, and to substitute in its place a
stronger and better. This important task was executed by Francis
Bacon, Lord Verulam, who will therefore justly be looked upon in
all future ages as the great reformer of philosophy, though his
own actual contributions to the stock of physical truths were
small, and his ideas of particular points strongly tinctured with
mistakes and errors, which were the fault rather of the general
want of physical information of the age than of any narrowness
of view on his own part; of this he was fully aware. It has been
attempted by some to lessen the merit of this great achievement,
by showing that the inductive method had been practised in many
instances, both ancient and modern, by the mere instinct of
mankind; but it is not the introduction of inductive reasoning,
as a new and hitherto untried process, which characterizes the
Baconian philosophy, but his keen perception, and his broad
and spirit-stirring, almost enthusiastic, announcement of its
paramount importance, as the alpha and omega of science, as the
grand and only chain for the linking together of physical truths,
and the eventual key to every discovery and every application.
Those who would deny him his just glory on such grounds would
refuse to Jenner or to Howard their civic crowns, because a
few farmers in a remote province had, time out of mind, been
acquainted with vaccination, or philanthropists, in all ages, had
occasionally visited the prisoner in his dungeon.”
“It is to our immortal countryman Bacon,” says he, again,
“that we owe the broad announcement of this grand and fertile
principle; and the development of the idea, that the whole of
natural philosophy consists entirely of a series of inductive
generalizations, commencing with the most circumstantially
stated particulars, and carried up to universal laws, or axioms,
which comprehend in their statements every subordinate degree of
generality and of a corresponding series of inverted reasoning
from generals to particulars, by which these axioms are traced
back into their remotest consequences, and all particular
propositions deduced from them, as well those by whose immediate
consideration we rose to their discovery, as those of which we
had no previous knowledge....
“It would seem that a union of two qualities almost opposite
to each other—a going forth of the thoughts in two directions,
and a sudden transfer of ideas from a remote station in one to
an equally distant one in the other—is required to start the
first idea of _applying science_. Among the Greeks, this point
was attained by Archimedes, but attained too late, on the eve
of that great eclipse of science which was destined to continue
for nearly eighteen centuries, till Galileo in Italy, and Bacon
in England, at once dispelled the darkness; the one, by his
inventions and discoveries; the other, by the irresistible force
of his arguments and eloquence.”[33]
His style is copious, comprehensive, and smooth; it does not flow
with the softness of the purling rill, but rather with the strength,
fulness, and swelling of a majestic river, and the rude harmony of the
mountain stream. His images are replete with poetry and thought; they
always illustrate his subject. Hallam is of opinion that the modern
writer that comes nearest to him is Burke. “He had,” said Addison,
“the sound, distinct, comprehensive knowledge of Aristotle, with all
the beautiful lights, graces, and embellishments of Cicero. One does
not know which to admire most in his writings, the strength of reason,
force of style, or brightness of imagination.”[34]
Bacon improved so much the melody, elegance, and force of English
prose, that we may apply to him what was said of Augustus with regard
to Rome: _lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit_; he found it brick,
and he left it marble. Mr. Hallam’s opinion differs somewhat from this;
it is as follows:—
“The style of Bacon has an idiosyncrasy which we might expect
from his genius. It can rarely indeed happen, and only in men
of secondary talents, that the language they use is not, by
its very choice and collocation, as well as its meaning, the
representative of an individuality that distinguishes their
turn of thought. Bacon is elaborate, sententious, often witty,
often metaphorical; nothing could be spared; his analogies are
generally striking and novel; his style is clear, precise,
forcible; yet there is some degree of stiffness about it, and in
mere language he is inferior to Raleigh.”[35]
It is a most remarkable characteristic of Bacon, and one in which Burke
resembled him, that his imagination grew stronger with his increasing
years, and his style richer and softer. “The fruit came first,” says
Mr. Macaulay, “and remained till the last; the blossoms did not appear
till late. In eloquence, in sweetness and variety of expression, and
in richness of illustration, his later writings are far superior to
those of his youth.” His earliest Essays have as much truth and cogent
reasoning as his latest; but these are far superior in grace and
beauty. A most striking illustration of this is afforded by one of the
last Essays, added a year before Bacon’s death, that of _Adversity_
(Essay V.), than which naught can be more graceful and beautiful.
The account of Bacon’s works will necessarily be very succinct, and,
we fear, imperfect. We shall, however, for each of them, call in the
aid of the most competent judges, whose award public opinion will not
reverse.