NOTE Y Y. 



templations without looking back. I humbly pray your lordship to pardon me 

 for troubling you with my melancholy. For the matter itself, 1 commend it to 

 your love ; only I pray you communicate afresh this day with my Lord Trea 

 surer and Sir Robert Cecil ; and if you esteem my fortune, remember the point 

 of precedency. The objections to my competitors your lordship knoweth partly. 

 I pray spare them not, not over the Queen, but to the great ones, to show your 

 confidence, and to work their distrust. Thus longing exceedingly to exchange 

 troubling your lordship with serving you, I rest your Lordship s, in most intire 

 and faithful service, FRANCIS BACON. March 30, 1594. 



I humbly pray your lordship I may hear from you some time this day. 



Y Y. Life, p. xxxiv. 



In the postscript to Bushel s Abridgment, page 1, he says, Reader, if thou 

 hast perused the foregoing treatise of the Isle of Bensalem, wherein the philo 

 sophical father of Solomon s house doth perfectly demonstrate my heroick 

 master (the Lord Chancellor Bacon s) design for the benefit of mankind ; then 

 give me leave to 1ell thee, how far that illustrious lord proceeding the practical 

 part of such his philososhical notions, and when and where they had their first 

 rise, as well as their first eclipse ; their first rise (as 1 have heard him say) was 

 from the noble nature of the Earle of Essex s affection, and so they were clouded 

 by his fall, although he bequeathed to that lord [upon his representing him 

 with a secret curiosity of nature, whereby to know the season of every hour of 

 the year by a philosophical glass, placed (with a small proportion of water) 

 in his chamber,] Twitnam Parke, and its garden of Paradise, to study in. But 

 the sudden change of his royal mistress s countenance acting so tragical a part 

 upon his only friend, and her once dearest favourite, he likewise yielded his law 

 studies as lost, despairing of any preferment from the present state, as by many 

 of his letters in his book of Remains appears, so that he retired to his philosophy 

 for some few months, from whence he presented the then rising sun (Prince 

 Henry) with an experiment of his second collections, to know the heart of 

 man by a sympathizing stone, made of several mixtures, and ushered in the 

 conceit with this ensuing discourse : Most royal Sir, Since you are by birth the 

 prince of our country, and your virtues the happy pledge to our posterity ; and 

 that the seigniority of greatness is ever attended more with flatterers than faithful 

 friends and loyal subjects ; and therefore needeth more helps to discern and 

 pry into the hearts of the people than private persons. Give me leave, noble 

 sir, as small rivulets run to the vast ocean, to pay their tribute ; so let me have 

 the honour to shew your highness the operative quality of these triangular 

 stones (as the first fruits of my philosophy), to imitate the pathetical motion of 

 the loadstone and iron, although made by the compounds of meteors (as star 

 shot jelly) and other like magical ingredients, with the reflected beams of the 

 sun, on purpose that the warmth distilled unto them through the moist heat of 

 the hand, might discover the affection of the heart, by a visible sign of their 

 attraction and appetite to each other, like the hand of a watch, within ten 

 minutes after they are laid upon a marble table, or the theatre of a large looking 

 glass. I write not this as a feigned story, but as a real truth ; for I was never 

 quiet in mind till I had procured those jewels of my lord s philosophy from Mr. 

 Achry Primrose, the prince s page. 



His love of philosophy thus appears in all his times of adversity. So true is 

 his observation, in his History of Arts : As a man s disposition is never well 

 known till he be crossed, nor Proteus ever changed shapes till he was straitened 

 and held fast ; so the passages and variations of nature cannot appear so fully 

 in the liberty of nature, as in the trials and vexations of art. 



Of this invention Archbishop Tennison, in his Baconiana, page 18, thus 

 speaks : His second invention was a secret curiosity of nature, whereby to 

 know the season of every hour of the year, by a philosophical glass placed (with 

 a small proportion of water) in a chamber. This invention 1 describe in the 

 words of him, from whom I had the notice of it, Mr. Thomas Bushel, one of 

 his lordship s menial servants ; a man skilful in discovering and opening of 



