FRAXCIS BACON. 



567 



Chancellor Egerton having fallen ill in February, 

 1616, Bacon jumps at the conclusion that he is 

 going to die, and straightway pens a letter to the 

 king, worthy of careful study as a specimen both 

 of Bacon's literary style and character. He be- 

 gins by making God the king's gardener. " Your 

 worthy chancellor, I fear, goes his last day. God 

 hath hitherto used to weed out such servants as 

 grew not fit for your majesty. But now he has 

 gathered to himself a true sage, or salvia, out of 

 your garden. . . . But," he goes on to say, " your 

 majesty's service must not be mortal." To save 

 it from such a fate he is of opinion that his maj- 

 esty should appoint him to the dying man's place, 

 and points out to his majesty that his appointment 

 would give his majesty the disposal of offices worth 

 £7,600 (about £40,000) per annum ; a chancel- 

 lor that would be ever on the lookout to prevent 

 his majesty being distracted with business ; that 

 was in the good graces of the Lower House, had 

 some interest with the gentlemen of England, 

 and would strengthen the inventive part of the 

 Council, " who now commonly do exercise rather 

 their judgments than their inventions." This 

 was the blowing of his own trumpet, a process 

 for which Bacon never wanted breath ; he made 

 as little scruple to dwell on the defects of possi- 

 ble rivals. The Lord Coke, his old enemy the 

 Huddler, " was of an overruling nature," and 

 would ill fit "an overruling place," would be 

 more useful in a financial office, and was a popu- 

 lar man ; " and popular men are no sure mount- 

 ers for your majesty's saddle." l Two days after 

 writing this letter he went to see Egerton. A 

 postscript of a note to Villiers tells us the sub- 

 stance of the interview : '< My lord-chancellor is 

 prettily amended. I was with him yesterday al- 

 most half an hour. He used me with wonderful 

 tokens of kindness. We both wept, which I do 

 not often." s The chancellor rallied, however, 

 and Bacon had to keep the curb on his impa- 

 tience for another year. 



All through these experiences his eye often 

 wandered to right and to left in search of an oc- 

 casional windfall. At one time he offers to farm 

 the alienations for the king at a handsome rent ; 

 at another he thinks the king ought to give him 

 £2,000 out of certain fines ; at another he begged 

 the privilege of " making a baron," that is, sell- 

 ing a peerage — a usual and very lucrative prac- 

 tice in James's reign — and pocketing the price. 

 But it was after his fall, when suddenly flung out 

 of the Olympus to gain which he had toiled so 



1 Spedding, vol. v., pp. 241-244. 

 a Ibid., vol. v., p. 245. 



painfully and borne so much, that he made the 

 most piteous appeals to Buckingham and the 

 king. He begs for an additional pension, for the 

 provostship of Eton, for payments anticipatory 

 of a handsome pension already granted him, for 

 an immediate remission of his whole sentence 

 and restoration to the House of Lords. He even 

 stooped to pray that an arrear of about £2,000, 

 which had been discovered to be due to the 

 crown by his half-brother, Sir Nicholas Bacon, 

 should be given him. " It is a suit," he writes to 

 Buckingham, " whereunto I may, as it were, 

 claim kindred." » Toward the end of his life 

 Bacon figures in history as a kind of St. Simeon 

 Stylites, " battering the gates of heaven " — his 

 heaven — " with storms of prayer." 



So far for the way he took to win power in 

 the state. But how did he use the power when 

 won ? The best that can fairly be said for him 

 is, I think, that he used it in the main not alto- 

 gether unsatisfactorily. But it should not be for- 

 gotten that the side of Bacon's public life which 

 can be contemplated with the nearest approach to 

 unqualified admiration was not connected with 

 the direct exercise of political power. If I were 

 asked what I believed to be Bacon's most con- 

 scious feeling regarding himself, I should answer 

 intellectual self-confidence. Pride of intellect, 

 some would perhaps prefer to call it, and perhaps 

 they would be right. From first to last Bacon 

 leaned with implicit faith on his own intelli- 

 gence ; whatever else might play him false, that, 

 he seemed to think, never could. The first arti- 

 cle of his creed was the practical infallibility of 

 his own judgment. When still young he told his 

 uncle that he had " taken all knowledge for his 

 province ; " and, when over forty, he discerned 

 in his nature a kind of relationship and familiarity 

 with truth, as being " gifted with desire to seek, 

 patience to doubt, fondness to meditate, slowness 

 to assert, readiness to consider, carefulness to 

 dispose and set in order." It is significant of this 

 element in Bacon's character that on the only two 

 occasions when he took an independent course 

 that displeased the sovereign, he was never for a 

 moment tempted, after he found out his mistake, 

 into an acknowledgment that he had been wrong. 

 He was ready to do anything to atone for his 

 conduct ; in the second instance, being chancel- 

 lor, he promptly wheeled round and undid ev- 

 erything he had done before in the matter ; but 

 neither in the first nor in the second did he utter 

 a single word capable of being construed into a 

 confession of error. The theory of the uncon- 

 1 Spedding, vol. vii., p. 451. 



