102 ARTHUR E. SHIPLEY 



thority which his personal eminence gave him, 

 firmly proclaimed, that the careful and system- 

 atic investigation of natural phenomena and 

 their accurate record would give to man a 

 power in this world which, in his time, was 

 hardly to be conceived. What he believed, 

 what he preached, he did not practise. "I only 

 sound the clarion, but I enter not into the 

 battle"; and yet this is not wholly true, for, 

 on a wintry March day, 1626, in the neighbor- 

 hood of Barnet, he caught the chill which 

 ended his life while stuffing a fowl with snow, 

 to see if cold would delay putrefaction. Har- 

 vey, who was working whilst Bacon was writ- 

 ing, said of him: "He writes philosophy like 

 a Lord Chancellor." This, perhaps, is true, 

 but his writings show him a man, weak and 

 pitiful in some respects, yet with an abiding 

 hope, a sustained object in life, one who sought 

 through evil days and in adverse conditions 

 "for the glory of God and the relief of man's 

 estate." 



Though Bacon did not make any one single 

 advance in natural knowledge — though his 

 precepts, as Whewell reminds us, "are now 



