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TUE POPULAR SCIENCE MOXTULY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



sciousness of genius in its bighest developments j 

 assuredly receives no support from Bacon's case. 

 Now, either from natural impulse or from mo- 

 tives of self-advancement, Bacon scrutinized very 

 keenly aud pondered very carefully the politics, 

 domestic and international, the burning religious 

 questions, the tendencies, movements, and other 

 easily-conceived manifestations of the then domi- 

 nant time-spirit. Thus endowed with a piercing 

 and discriminating intellect, and having of his 

 own free-will turned that intellect on the subjects 

 that then engaged the attention of the rulers of 

 men, he considered himself justified in giving ad- 

 vice, generally unasked, to those that needed it 

 most, the great personages that were in the thick 

 of the fight, and might therefore, Bacon may 

 have thought, be the better of seeing things as 

 the clearest pair of eyes in Christendom saw 

 them. Accordingly Bacon, from his youth up, 

 seems to have constituted himself a sort of coun- 

 selor-general — unattached, but very willing to be 

 attached — to the great and powerful. He drew 

 up weighty papers of considerations for the 

 queen, for Walsingham, for Cecil, for Essex, for 

 King James, for any one, in fact, that was in a 

 position to profit by the advice and bring profit 

 to the adviser. His first occasional paper, writ- 

 ten in his twenty-fifth year, is a letter of advice 

 to the queen, in which he respectfully interprets 

 to her the leading questions of the hour, and pre- 

 scribes the attitude she ought to take toward 

 them. Many people would look on this as pre- 

 sumption and monstrous self-conceit. A youth 

 of twenty-five thrusting his views and counsel on 

 the veteran ruler who had taken her seat in the 

 centre of public affairs before her self-appointed 

 adviser was born, and who had watched them 

 Argus-eyed ever since, cannot certainly be quoted 

 as an example of all that is most graceful in 

 youth. Yet it is worth noting how much of this 

 volunteered advice is in harmony with the so- 

 berest judgment of the present day, and how lit- 

 tle of the passion or prejudice of the moment is 

 visible in it. Indeed, most of these extra-official 

 observations are rich in thought of almost price- 

 less value ; a spirit of calm contemplation, as of 

 one that dwelt in a serener atmosphere, far above 

 the " dust of systems and of creeds," pervades 

 them ; and to us who live on the safe side of the 

 historic convulsions to the movements tending to 

 which these papers belong, they seem weighty 

 with solid practical sense as well. To give a sin- 

 gle example : the " Considerations touching the 

 Queen's Service in Ireland," which he sent to his 

 cousin Robert Cecil in 1602, to help him to see 



his way through the intricacies of the Irish prob- 

 lem then calling as loudly to English statesmen 

 for solution as ever it has called in our own 

 times, reveal him as not only perfect master of 

 the subject, but as urging a policy that in most 

 of its features every one not a fanatic now be- 

 lieves would have been the wisest. Let us take 

 this extract as a sample : " Therefore a toleration 

 of religion (for a time not definite), except it be 

 in some principal towns and precincts, after the 

 manner of some French edicts, scemeth to me to 

 be a matter warrantable by religion, and in pol- 

 icy of absolute necessity." ' Yet the one recom- 

 mendation of Bacon's regarding Ireland that he 

 lived to see carried out, the plantation of Ulster, 

 has been emphatically condemned by the intoler- 

 ant dogmatism of later years that plumes itself 

 on being judicial history ; but fact, I take it, has 

 abundantly vindicated the wisdom of Bacon in 

 this particular in the eyes of those who have not 

 surrendered their natural eyesight to a theory. 



But I would limit this almost unqualified com- 

 mendation of Bacon's expositions of state policy 

 to his comparatively unofficial days. When at- 

 torney-general or chancellor he seems to have 

 now and then allowed unworthy considerations 

 to dim somewhat his clearness of vision, to have 

 been a little disposed to find a solution of the 

 question before him that would be agreeable to 

 the king rather than one that would be just and 

 politic. The same familiar ground furnishes us 

 with an illustration of this. During his attorney- 

 generalship he advised the king to prohibit ab- 

 solutely the exportation of wools from Ireland, 

 thus doing his worst to strangle in the cradle, 

 from purely selfish purposes, a natural and grow- 

 ing branch of Irish industry, the suppression of 

 which in later times did perhaps more to injure 

 Ireland and to evoke the Nemesis under whose 

 lash England still winces, than any other single 

 cause. It is suggestive also to compare the tol- 

 erant course toward the Catholics that Bacon 

 pleaded for when unemployed, with his actual 

 treatment of the Catholics when he was attorney- 

 general. Writing to the king in 1615, he says: 

 " I have heard more ways than one of an offer of 

 £20,000 per annum for farming the penalties of 

 recusants. . . . Wherein I will presume to say 

 that my poor endeavors, since I was by your great 

 and sole grace your attorney, have been no small 

 spurs to make them feel your laws and seek this 

 redemption." 2 But these are among the excep- 

 tional eases that prove the rule, and the rule is 

 that Bacon's "Considerations," whether upon a 

 1 Spedding, vol. iii., p. 49. 2 Ibid., vol. v., p. 102. 



