PREFACE, Xxxi 
was made King’s Serjeant, and Bacon became Solicitor General 
‘in his stead on the 25th of June, 1607. 
He had now no longer to fear that want would either steal 
upon him as a wayfaring man or assault him as an armed man, 
and in the greater tranquillity of mind which resulted he gave 
himself up to the developement of his plan for enlarging the 
borders of human knowledge. The Great Instauration seems 
now to have taken a definite form, and as a means of clearing 
the way for its reception he wrote the treatise called Cogitata 
et Visa, which must have been the product of the latter half 
of the year 1607. His professional work of the same period 
is represented by ‘A view of the differences in question 
betwixt the King’s Bench and the Council in the Marches,’ 
and by two proclamations, the one touching the Marches, the 
other concerning Jurors. 
The next year (1608) is marked by the falling in of the 
clerkship of the Star-Chamber, by the death of William Mill 
on the 16th of July. Bacon had waited patiently for it nearly 
twenty years. In the summer vacation, and possibly during 
the unwilling leisure caused by an outbreak of the plague, he 
wrote his treatise In felicem memoriam Elizabethae, and towards 
the end of the year his discourse on the Plantation in Ireland, 
which will even now be read with interest. Letters to his 
friend Toby Matthew show that during the following year 
(1609) the Instauration was not laid aside. ‘My Instauration 
I reserve for our conference; it sleeps not.’ He sent him ‘a 
leaf or two of the Preface, carrying some figure of the whole 
work.’ Shortly after he forwarded another portion, which 
may have been the Redargutio Philosophiarum. In the course 
of this year, also, he wrote and submitted to the judgement of 
the same friend, a little work of his recreation, as he calls it, 
the treatise De Sapientia Veterum, on the interpretation of the 
ancient fables of Greece and Rome. The Cogitata et Visa had 
undergone revision and elaboration at the same time, and a 
copy was sent in MS. to Bishop Andrewes, who had been 
translated from Chichester to Ely. 
The session of 1609-10 was occupied with disputes between 
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