p. 211,

his life was even threatened ; and he went in daily hazard of assassination. This obliged him to publish, in his own defence, the Apology we find among his writings. It is long and elaborate; but not, perhaps, in every part satisfactory. Let us believe him on his Apology, own testimony, that he had never done that noble. Vol. Jņ. man any ill offices with the queen; though she herself had, it seems, insinuated the contrary : that on the other hand he had always, during the time of their intimacy, given him advice no less useful than sincere; that he had wished, nay endeavoured the earl's preservation even at last, purely from affection to him, without any regard to his own interest in that endeavour: let all this be allowed; some blemish will still remain on his character.

Essex deserved the fate he underwent: but he had paid his debt to justice : and the commonwealth had now nothing to fear from any of his party. The declaration above mentioned could therefore be intended, only to still the present clamours of the multitude; and though the matter of it might be true, Bacon was not the man who should have published those truths. He had been long and highly indebted to the earl's friendship, almost beyond the example even of that age.

In another man this proceeding might not have been blameable; in him it cannot be excused. In the next reign Sir Henry Aul. CoYelverton ventured on the displeasure both of the qui. p. 186. king and his minion, rather than do the ministry of his office, by pleading against the earl of Somerset, who had made him solicitor-general. Had Bacon refused that invidious part, there were others, among the herd of aspiring and officious lawyers, ready enough to have performed it: and his very enemies must have thought more advantageously of him for declining a task, in itself of no essential importance to the state, and in him unjust to friendship, obligation, gratitude, the most sacred regards among men.

Elizabeth survived her favourite about a year: and, Osborn, if we may credit Osborn, grief and remorse for his p. 459.

*

the first

160S.

• He is fate accompanied her to the grave.* She died the
author who twenty-fourth of March, 1603, in the fulness of days
mentions the and honour. Her reign had been long and triumph-
story of
the ring

ant: and she had through the whole course of it pre-
served, what she so justly merited, the love and ve-
neration of her people; the truest glory, the rarest
felicity of a sovereign ! She was succeeded by James
the Sixth of Scotland, under whom Bacon ascended,
by several steps, to the highest dignity of the law.

This prince, the most unwarlike that ever lived,
was born in the midst of civil commotions; at a time
when his whole kingdom was torn into factions, be-
twixt the party who had espoused the interests of his
mother, and those who had declared for him.'. After
he had taken the administration into his own hands,
he was hardly ever his own master; suffering him-
self to be led implicitly by the cabal in whose power
he then happened to be. The moment he thought
himself at liberty from either, like a boy escaped from
under the eye of a rigid preceptor, he forgot all his
uneasiness, and abandoned himself to his favourite
amusements of hawking and hunting, as if his king-
dom had been in the profoundest tranquillity. He
grew up in an unaccountable fondness for favourites.
The first, who took deep root with him, was likewise
the worst; not only encouraging him in a total inap-

plication to business, but tincturing his youth with Melvil's the poison of all debauchery. The name of this man

was Stuart, afterward earl of Arran; one who had
great and dangerous vices, without a single virtue,
private or public, to atone for them : an open scof-
fer at the obligations of morality, insolent, rapacious,
sanguinary, hated by, and hating, all good men. The
honester part of the nobility often remonstrated
against the credit and pernicious influence of this
minion : James acknowledged the justice of their re-

monstrances; banished him several times from court; Melvil, and several times received him into new favour. He

was at length shot by a private hand, in revenge for
the death of the earl of Morton, to which he had
basely contributed

Mem.

p. 131.

p. 200.

.

.

James hated the church of Scotland; and con- Melvil, firmed its authority. He declared the attempt of P. 132. those lords, who had rescued him out of the hands of Arran and Lenox, to be just and serviceable: he afterwards banished them, and would have confis- p. 139. cated their estates, on that very account. When they had made themselves masters of his person a second time, he pronounced them all traitors; and pardoned p. 169. them.

Elizabeth, who knew his genius perfectly, sent Mr. Wotton on an embassy to him in 1585. Her intention was to divert him from a marriage with the princess of Denmark, and to give his counsels what other turn her interests might require. The ambassador, a man of address and intrigue, had, by long habitude, learnt to personate all characters, and to assume, with an ease that seemed altogether unaffected, whatever shape might serve most effectually the purposes of his superiors. At the age of twenty-one p. 161. he had been employed to sound the intentions of the court of France : and had well nigh duped the famous constable de Montmorency, a minister grown grey in the observation of human falsehood and artifice. To his natural talent he had now added the experience of thirty years more. By accompanying king James in his sports; by falling in frankly, and as it were naturally, with all his passions ; by making a jest of business; by entertaining him pleasantly with an account of foreign fashions and follies; this man gained an absolute ascendant not only over his understanding, but over his humour. His most faithful subjects, who had served him longest and best, who had even warned him against the subtleties of this stranger, he received with approbation or dislike, just as Wotton inspired him. He was even brought p. 164. by him to be seriously persuaded that the king of Denmark was descended from a race of merchants, and that an alliance with his daughter was therefore infinitely beneath a king of Scotland's dignity.

Such was the prince who now mounted that throne, An. 1603, which Elizabeth had filled with so great capacity and

p. 7.

reputation. The union of the two crowns in the person of one sovereign, was extremely dreaded by foreigners, and in particular by Henry the Fourth of France. The accession of a new kingdom to the native force of England, which even alone had been long formidable on the continent; the alliance of James with the most potent monarch of the North; his relation to the house of Lorrain, which had lately embroiled all France, rendered such fears very probable. But his conduct dissipated them for ever: and all Europe quickly saw, that no people but his own had any thing to apprehend from his power. At his arrival in England, he bestowed titles and honours with so wild a profusion, that there hardly remained

any other mark of distinction but that of having esWilson, caped them. The public stood amazed; and pas

quinades were openly affixed, undertaking to assist weaker memories to a complete knowledge of the nobility. Sir Francis Bacon, who had been early in his homage, and application for favour, to the new sovereign, was knighted by him in person: and has

left us the following picture of him, strongly touched Bacon, in its most obvious features. “His speech,” says he, Vol. V.“ is swift and cursory; and in the full dialect of his

country: in matters of business, short; in general “ discourse, large. He affecteth popularity, by grac

ing such as he hath heard to be popular; not by

any fashions of his own. He is thought somewhat “ general in his favours; and his easiness of access “ is rather because he is much abroad and in a แ “ crowd, than that he giveth easy audience. He “hasteneth to a mixture of both kingdoms and occa“sions faster, perhaps, than policy will well bear.”

In 1605, Sir Francis Bacon recommended himself to the king's particular notice, as well as to the general esteem of his cotemporaries, by publishing a work he had long meditated; The Progress and Advancement of Learning. The great aim of this treatise, no less original in the design than happy in the execution, was to survey accurately the whole state and extent of the intellectual world, what parts of it had

Letter
LXXIII.

An. 1605.

of sup

Baconiana,

P. 25.

been unsuccessfully cultivated; what lay still neg-
lected, or unknown; and by what methods these
might be discovered; and those improved to the far-
ther advantage of society and human nature. By
exposing the errors and imperfections of our know-
ledge, he led mankind into the only right way
plying the one, and reforming the other: he taught

, them to know their wants. He even went farther, and himself pointed out to them the general methods of correction and improvement in the whole circle of arts and sciences. This work he first published in Tennison's English ; but to render it of more extensive use, he recommended a translation of it into Latin to Dr. Playfer of Cambridge. Playfer, with the scrupulous accuracy of a grammarian, was more attentive to fashion his style to purity and roundness of periods, made out of the phraseology he had gleaned from classic writers, than to render his author's meaning in clear and masculine language. After the sight of a specimen or two, Sir Francis did not encourage him to proceed in it. He himself, after his retirement, very much enlarged and corrected the original, and with the assistance of some friends, turned the whole into Latin. This is the edition of 1623; and stands p. 27. as the first part to his great Instauration of the Sciences.

I have already observed that Cecil, now earl of Salisbury, opposed the progress of our author's fortune under Elizabeth : and he seems to have observed the same conduct towards him in the present reign, till he had fixed himself in the king's confidence so firmly as to be above all fear of a rival. Besides him, Sir Francis Bacon found a violent and lasting enemy in a man of his own profession, Sir Edward Coke; who, with great parts, had many and Stephens's signal failings. The quarrel betwixt them seems to have been personal : and it lasted to the end of their lives. Coke was jealous of Bacon's reputation in many parts of knowledge: by whom, again, he was envied for the high reputation he had acquired in one; each aiming to be admired, particularly, for

Collections,

p. ix.

: