FRANCIS BACOX. 



569 



war with Spain or upon Sutton's estate, upon the 

 pacification of the Church or upon jury reform, are 

 wise with a wisdom far beyond the wisest work- 

 ing wisdom of his century, having but one obvious 

 drawback — that they were too far in advance of 

 the times they were intended to benefit to be of 

 much use to them. This passion for giving ad- 

 vice continued with Bacon to the last. Two years 

 after his fall he writes to Buckingham, " But when 

 I look abroad and see the times so stirring, and so 

 much dissimulation, falsehood, baseness, and envy 

 in the world, and so many idle clocks going in 

 men's heads ; then it grieveth me much that I 

 am not sometimes at your lordship's elbow, that 

 I mought give you some of the fruits of the care- 

 ful advice, modest liberty, and true information of 

 a friend that loveth your lordship as I do." ' 



Clear-sighted, however, as Bacon was, he was 

 as blind as the most horn-eyed among his con- 

 temporaries to the real significance of the signs 

 of the times. Fourteen years after his death, the 

 deepest and broadest political upheaval that has 

 ever convulsed English life put itself in motion, 

 and in two years more became a war that shook 

 the firmest-based political and religious fabric in 

 Europe to its foundations. The forces that gave 

 birth to that upheaval were gathering, indeed 

 must have been actively at work, in Bacon's time. 

 Their outward manifestations were familiar, and a 

 subject of grave reflection to Bacon. Yet his wri- 

 tings betray as little sensibility to the " whither- 

 ward " of English politics and religion in his day 

 as they do to the other great spiritual phenom- 

 enon that makes his age so absorbingly inter- 

 esting, the Shakespearean drama. The fact is 

 really worth more than a passing thought. Here 

 was the most penetrating and vigilant intelligence 

 that has ever employed itself on contemporary 

 politics, and an imagination of rare breadth and 

 power, entirely ignorant of the leading tendency 

 of the politics they studied, and utterly indifferent 

 to the noblest works of imagination that were get- 

 ting produced. and published within a mile's dis- 

 tance. The party that in its manhood scattered 

 princes and their armies at Naseby and Worces- 

 ter, and gave to England its last ruler of the old 

 colossal type, was called by Bacon in its infancy 

 " a small number of very silly and base people, 

 now by the good remedies that have been used 

 suppressed and worn out." And the picture of a 

 contented people, a church luminous " as an heav- 

 en of stars," a learned and just bench of judges, 

 a careful, loyal, and free-spoken Council, an effi- 

 cient magistracy, and the rest, that Bacon paint- 

 1 Speddiug, vol. vii., p. 423. 



ed for the king as a New-Year's gift for 1G19, l 

 would be ludicrous if it were not so sad when 

 looked at in the lurid light that a tragic event of 

 almost exactly thirty years later throws upon it. 

 Bacon could gaze fixedly on the face of the sky 

 and of the earth, but could not discern the cloud 

 that had already risen out of the west. The words 

 of Mr. Kuskin, slightly altered, will convey the 

 lesson to us : " Above all things let us see that we 

 be modest in our thoughts, for of this one thing 

 we may be absolutely sure, that all our thoughts 

 are but degrees of darkness." a 



The story of Bacon's public acts will, I think, 

 kindle in the unbiased mind a very different feel- 

 ing from that kindled by a study of his specula- 

 tions. To me, at least, many of them are of a 

 very questionable character, though the best in- 

 formed of Bacon's biographers can see nothing in 

 the worst of them that is not excusable. Bacon's 

 public career has one very suspicious feature — its 

 history is studded with facts that require elabo- 

 rate explanations and apologies before any ingen- 

 uous mind can be reconciled to them. For Ba- 

 con's letters are not like Cromwell's, do not bear 

 the stamp of a disinterested spirit on their very 

 face ; unlimited comment and explanation are 

 necessary. One can easily fancy an essentially 

 upright man doing now and then a thing whose 

 blameless character is not obvious at first sight ; 

 but an essentially upright man doing so many 

 things that require such an expenditure of expla- 

 nation to show that they were all right as Bacon 

 did, is not so easily fancied. And Bacon's justi- 

 fication necessitates the reversal of all that was 

 seemingly solid in our long-established concep- 

 tions of English history in James's reign, and a 

 reconstruction of that history on an entirely new 

 basis. For with James's whole course of policy, 

 and with many of the proceedings of his reign 

 that later history has pronounced wrong, unjusti- 

 fiable, ill-judged, and wicked, Bacon was closely 

 connected : the reputation of the reign must stand 

 or fall with his reputation ; it is impossible to de- 

 fend or excuse him without defending or excusing 

 the master he served under and the men he act- 

 ed with. From this task of revolutionizing our 

 thoughts regarding the character of the British 

 Solomon and of his reign, Mr. Spedding has not 



1 Spedding, vol. vi., p. 452. 



2 The essay "Of Empire" supplies another striking 

 illustration of the dimness of even Bacon's spiritual 

 vision. In 1625 he says of the Second Nobles or Gen- 

 tlemen that kings need not apprehend " much danger 

 from them, being a body dispersed: they may some- 

 times discourse high, but that doth little hurt." If he 

 had only lived till 1645 1 



