Cclviii LIFE OF BACON. 



that his lordship would employ him often in this service, 

 whilst he was there, and was better pleased with his 

 minutes, or notes, set down by him, than by others who 

 did not well understand his lordship. He told me that he 

 was employed in translating part of the Essays, viz. three 

 of them, one whereof was that of Greatness of Cities, the 

 other two I have now forgot.&quot; (a) 



Such was the gorgeous splendour, such the union of 

 action and contemplation in which he lived. 



Alienation About this period the King conferred upon him the 



York eand valuable farm of the Alienation Office, and he succeeded 



House. i n obtaining for his residence, York House, the place of 



his birth, and where his father had lived, when Lord 



Keeper in the reign of Elizabeth, (b) 



This may be considered the summit of this great man s 

 worldly prosperity. He had been successively Solicitor 

 and Attorney General, Privy Councillor, Lord Keeper, and 

 Lord Chancellor, having had conferred upon him the dig 

 nities first of Knight, then of Baron of Verulam, and 

 early in the next year, of Viscount St. Albans; but, above 

 all, he was distinguished through Europe by a much 

 prouder title, as the greatest of English Philosophers. 

 His birth At York House, on the 22nd of January, 1620, he cele- 

 da A D Crated his sixtieth birthday, surrounded by his admirers 

 1620. and friends, amongst whom was Ben Jonson, who corn 

 et. 60. p Qse( j i n honour of the day a poem founded on the fiction 

 of the poet s surprize upon his reaching York House, 



(a) See Aubrey, p. 228. I have an engraving of this house. 



(6) Besides other good gifts and bounties of the hand, which his majesty 

 gave him, both out of the broad seal, and out of the Alienation Office, to 

 the value in both of 1900 per annum, which, with his manor of Gorham- 

 bury, and other lands and possessions near thereunto adjoining, amounting 

 to a third part more, he retained to his dying day. Rawley. See note 

 A of this work. 



