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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



amount of apologetic literature will ever wholly 

 wash away. The fact remains that the greatest 

 intellect of his time was kept shivering in the 

 shade for two-thirds of his working life. 



Some think that the Cecils, father and son, 

 looked with a jealous eye on their young kins- 

 man, and seeing in him a possible obstacle to 

 their own designs, craftily poisoned their mis- 

 tress's mind against him. For this notion there 

 is nothing that can be called evidence, unless the 

 fact that Bacon and his mother were at one time 

 strongly suspicious of the younger Cecil — and 

 with Lady Bacon at least suspicions were cer- 

 tainties — is to be taken as such. The elder Cecil 

 gave him the reversion of the clerkship of the 

 Star-chamber, a post worth £1,600 a year, equal 

 to £8,000 now ; to the younger, Bacon is almost 

 passionate in protesting his devotion. " I do 

 protest before God," he once wrote to Robert 

 Cecil, " without compliment or any light vein of 

 mind, if I knew in what course of life to do you 

 best service, I would take it, and make my 

 thoughts, which now fly to many pieces, be re- 

 duced to that centre." ! I am nearly sure that 

 the tardiness in Bacon's upward progress was not 

 due to any active ill-will on the part of the Cecils. 



Some think that the deep offense that Bacon 

 gave the queen by his unexpected display of 

 spirit in the Parliament of 1593, when he helped 

 to spoil an ingenious plan for entrapping the 

 Commons into an acknowledgment of a coordi- 

 nate power in the Lords over money bills, thrust 

 him back from the door at a critical moment. 

 There is no doubt that the queen was greatly dis- 

 pleased on this occasion, and denied the offend- 

 er admission to her presence for a considerable 

 time. Yet patience and prudent management 

 brought back tha queen's favor, though it did not 

 bring the preferment his soul longed for. Eliza- 

 beth died, and al! that Bacon gained from the new 

 king was a pension of sixty pounds a year, se- 

 curity in his position of learned counsel, and the 

 cheap honor of knighthood; more than four 

 years had yet to pass before the coveted solicitor- 

 ship was given him. 



It might be thought that Bacon was unfor- 

 tunate in his choice of a profession. That a man 

 whom so fastidious a critic as Joubert decides to 

 have been " a grand and noble intellect," and who 

 was fully alive to his own powers, should have 

 elected to win his way to wealth and learned lei- 

 sure through 



" That codeless myriad of precedent, 

 That wilderness of single instances," 



1 Spedding, vol. iv., p. 247. 



called the law of England, is not exactly what 

 we should have expected. Bacon wrangling with 

 Coke about the reseizure of the lands of a re- 

 lapsed recusant! 1 Cutting blocks with a razor 

 is a most inexpressive image of such a proceed- 

 ing ; a Beethoven or a Wagner grinding Yankee 

 Doodle on a barrel»organ daily from morning to 

 evening would be more like the thing. But it 

 was only when all other avenues were apparently 

 closed against him that Bacon took seriously to 

 practising the law. 



Perhaps the true reason of Bacon's being 

 kept waiting so long lies nearer the surface. May 

 it not have been that both Elizabeth and James 

 were unwilling to take him into their service be- 

 cause they thought him unfit for it ? The most 

 excellent of Elizabeth's many royal excellences, 

 historians tell us, was a keen insight into char- 

 acter, and a readiness to be served by available 

 merit, wherever found. It is wellnigh inconceiv- 

 able that she would have declined to employ 

 Bacon had she been assured that to employ him 

 would have been for her advantage and the 

 nation's ; and James simply picked up the reins 

 as they had fallen from Elizabeth's hands. The 

 early part of his reign was merely a continuance 

 of his predecessor's so far as the change of chari : 

 oteers allowed. It is not unlikely — there are not 

 a few touches in Bacon's biography that suggest 

 it — that Bacon was regarded at court rather as a 

 thinker than as a man of action, a speculative 

 dreamer rather than an efficient worker. Now, 

 the clerkship of the Star-chamber was just the 

 place for such a man ; its income, managed with 

 ordinary prudence, would have given him abun- 

 dant leisure to dream on things to come, and to 

 build up great instaurations to his heart's con- 

 tent. And if Mr. Mill, the man in possession, 

 had no sense of his responsibilities, and kept 

 Bacon out of the place for nineteen years by liv- 

 ing unconscionably long, that was not Elizabeth's 

 fault or Burghley's. Now and then Bacon him- 

 self betrays a consciousness of unfitness for the 

 work he was so eager to undertake. Writing to 

 Bodley in 1606, he says: "I do confess, since I 

 was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect 

 been absent from that I have done ; and in ab- 

 sence are many errors which I do willingly ac- 

 knowledge, and among the rest this great one 

 that led the rest— that, knowing myself by in- 

 ward calling to be fitter to hold a book than to 

 play a part, I have led my life in civil causes, for 

 which' I was not very fit by nature, and more 



1 Spedding, vol. iii., pp. 1-5. 



