on Elizabeth. It is a clear, able, of course ex parte statement of the doings of the three chief actors, two of whom could no longer answer for themselves, or correct and contradict the third. It represents the Queen as implacable and cruel, Essex as incorrigibly and outrageously wilful, proud, and undutiful, Bacon himself as using every effort and device to appease the Queen's anger and suspiciousness, and to bring Essex to a wiser and humbler mind. The picture is indeed a vivid one, and full of dramatic force, of an unrelenting and merciless mistress bent on breaking and bowing down to the dust the haughty spirit of a once loved but rebellious favourite, whom, though he has deeply offended, she yet wishes to bring once more under her yoke; and of the calm, keen-witted looker-on, watching the dangerous game, not without personal interest, but with undisturbed presence of mind, and doing his best to avert an irreparable and fatal breach. How far he honestly did his best for his misguided friend we can only know from his own report; but there is no reason to think that he did Essex ill service, though he notices in passing an allegation that the Queen in one of her angry fits had charged him with this. But his interest clearly was to make up the quarrel between the Queen and Essex. Bacon would have been a greater man with both of them if he had been able to do so. He had been too deeply in Essex's intimacy to make his new position of mediator, with a strong bias on the Queen's side, quite safe and easy for a man of honourable mind; but a cool-judging and prudent man may well have acted as he represents himself acting without forgetting what he owed to his friend. Till the last great moment

of trial there is a good deal to be said for Bacon: a man keenly alive to Essex's faults, with a strong sense of what he owed to the Queen and the State, and with his own reasonable chances of rising greatly prejudiced by Essex's folly. But at length came the crisis which showed the man, and threw light on all that had passed before, when he was picked out, out of his regular place, to be charged with the task of bringing home the capital charge against Essex. He does not say he hesitated. He does not say that he asked to be excused the terrible office. He did not flinch as the minister of vengeance for those who required that Essex should die. He did his work, we are told by his admiring biographer, better than Coke, and repaired the blunders of the prosecution. He passes over very shortly this part of the business: "it was laid upon me with the rest of my fellows;" yet it is the knot and key of the whole, as far as his own character is concerned. Bacon had his public duty: his public duty may have compelled him to stand apart from Essex. But it was his interest, it was no part of his public duty, which required him to accept the task of accuser of his friend, and in his friend's direst need calmly to drive home a well-directed stroke that should extinguish chances and hopes, and make his ruin certain. No one who reads his anxious letters about preferment and the Queen's favour, about his disappointed hopes, about his straitened means and distress for money, about his difficulties with his creditors-he was twice arrested for debt-can doubt that the question was between his own prospects and his friend; and that to his own interest he sacrificed his friend and his own honour.

CHAPTER III.

BACON AND JAMES I.

BACON'S life was a double one. There was the life of high thinking, of disinterested aims, of genuine enthusiasm, of genuine desire to delight and benefit mankind, by opening new paths to wonder and knowledge and power. And there was the put on and worldly life, the life of supposed necessities for the provision of daily bread, the life of ambition and self-seeking, which he followed, not without interest and satisfaction, but at bottom because he thought he must-must be a great man, must be rich, must live in the favour of the great, because without it his great designs could not be accomplished. His original plan of life was disclosed in his letter to Lord Burghley: to get some office with an assured income and not much work, and then to devote the best of his time to his own subjects. But this, if it was really his plan, was gradually changed : first, because he could not get such a place; and next because his connection with Essex, the efforts to gain him the Attorney's place, and the use which the Queen made of him after Essex could do no more for him, drew him more and more into public work, and specially the career of the law. We know that he would not by

preference have chosen the law, and did not feel that his vocation lay that way. But it was the only way open to him for mending his fortunes. And so the two lives went on side by side, the worldly one-he would have said, the practical one-often interfering with the life of thought and discovery, and partly obscuring it, but yet always leaving it paramount in his own mind. His dearest and most cherished ideas, the thoughts with which he was most at home and happiest, his deepest and truest ambitions, were those of an enthusiastic and romantic believer in a great discovery just within his grasp. They were such as the dreams and visions of his great Franciscan namesake, and of the imaginative seekers after knowledge in the middle ages, real or mythical, Albert the Great, Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus ; they were the eager undoubting hopes of the physical students in Italy and England in his own time, Giordano Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert, Galileo, or the founders of the Italian prototype of "Solomon's House" in the New Atlantis, the precursor of our Royal Societies, the Academy of the Lincei at Rome. Among these meditations was his inner life. But however he may have originally planned his course, and though at times under the influence of disappointment he threatened to retire to Cambridge or to travel abroad, he had bound himself fast to public life, and soon ceased to think of quitting it. And he had a real taste for it, for its shows, its prizes, for the laws and turns of the game, for its debates and vicissitudes. He was no mere idealist or recluse to undervalue or despise the real grandeur of the world. He took the keenest interest in the nature and ways of mankind; he liked to observe, to generalise in shrewd

and sometimes cynical epigrams. He liked to apply his powerful and fertile intellect to the practical problems of society and government, to their curious anomalies, to their paradoxical phenomena; he liked to address himself, either as an expounder or a reformer, to the principles and entanglements of English law; he aspired, both as a lecturer and a legislator, to improve and simplify it. It was not beyond his hopes to shape a policy, to improve administration, to become powerful by bringing his sagacity and largeness of thought to the service of the State, in reconciling conflicting forces, in mediating between jealous parties and dangerous claims. And he liked to enter into the humours of a Court; to devote his brilliant imagination and affluence of invention either to devising a pageant which should throw all others into the shade, or a compromise which should get great persons out of some difficulty of temper or pique.

In all these things he was as industrious, as laborious, as calmly persevering and tenacious, as he was in his pursuit of his philosophical speculations. He was a compound of the most adventurous and most diversified ambition, with a placid and patient temper, such as we commonly associate with moderate desires and the love of retirement and an easy life. To imagine and dare anything, and never to let go the object of his pursuit, is one side of him; on the other, he is obsequiously desirous to please and fearful of giving offence, the humblest and most grateful and also the most importunate of suitors, ready to bide his time with an even cheerfulness of spirit, which yet it was not safe to provoke by ill offices and the wish to thwart him. He never misses a chance of