sublime and solitary meditation, and was so proudly and justly confident in the yet unexercised strength of his intellect, that he entreated Burleigh, the powerful favourite and Chancellor, to procure him from the state some provision which would enable him to prosecute his studies in uninterrupted leisure.

Burleigh, however, refused to accede to a proposition which must have appeared then, as it would now, so extraordinary and unusual; and the young philosopher was obliged to devote himself to the study of the law, which he pursued with industry and success. Bacon's after career affords a melancholy example of the danger of neglecting that inward voice which calls, as we have said a few lines back, the sublimer intellects among mankind to the true sphere of their exertions, whispering to the mental, as the Dæmon of Socrates to the moral, ear the true direction of the

course.

While studying the law in Gray's Inn, Bacon sketched out the first plan of the 'Instauration,' and probably had decided upon the general purport and arrangement of the great works which contain his conclusions. The rest of his personal career may be described in a few words: the task is a melancholy and humiliating one. He rapidly passed through the inferior dignities of the law and of the state, being appointed queen's counsel in 1590, and in 1593 chosen member of parliament for the county of Middlesex. Both in the courts of law and in the House of Commons he was distinguished for the vastness of his knowledge and for the brilliancy of his eloquence; but he was also notorious, even in that age, for his subserviency to the most iniquitous despotism of the court. Having on one occasion (we select a single example from among many) advocated before the Commons, with all the power which marked his mind, a measure of a popular tendency, he was weak enough, on the first intimation of his independence having displeased the sovereign, to renounce, with shameless facility, the convictions which he had just before been asserting, and even to apologise for having entertained them. But this great man was reserved for yet greater degradation. His political conduct continued to present a worthy continuation to this lamentable commencement. Obeying every fickle current of court favour, he first deserted the party of the Cecils (i. e. of his first protector and kinsman Burleigh) for that of the unfortunate Essex, who, failing in obtaining for his new proselyte the dignity of attorney-general, rewarded his apostacy with the gift of an estate at Twickenham worth two thousand pounds.

Bacon's attachment to Essex was as mercenary as had been his adherence to Burleigh, and, on the disgrace and impeachment of the Earl, the great lawyer showed a base eagerness to aid the overthrow of the unhappy and illustrious victim, exhibiting a

ferocious violence hardly exceeded in the long and black annals of mercenary tribunals and subservient advocates. In order to gratify the court, Bacon crowned his apostacy by composing a Declaration of the Treasons and Practices of the Earl of Essex.' In the foul descent from baseness to baseness which marks the whole of Bacon's political career, we cannot find any extenuating circumstances, except indeed such as transfer his guilt from deliberate depravity to a servile calculation of interest. It is consoling indeed to reflect that there has been in no part of human conduct so great an improvement in point of morality as in the change which has taken place in political relations from the sixteenth century to the present day. The fatal prevalence of that atrocious and infernal policy which is systematised with such a hideous minuteness in the pages of Machiavelli, had extended itself from the petty Italian states, where it first appeared, to all the countries of Europe; and that dreadful sophism that " we may do evil that good may come" had destroyed the natural barriers between right and wrong in public affairs. It is but a poor excuse to say that Bacon was no worse than many of his contemporaries; still less to attempt to palliate ingratitude and cowardice by alleging that Bacon deserted his benefactors and attacked the fallen without the inducement of passion and animosity: the avarice, the ambition, the cool calculation of profit, which was the cause of such wretched servility, is certainly not less able to excite our contempt, than a similar conduct dictated by sincere hatred or a natural depravity would be capable of inspiring us with detestation. The truth is that Bacon, though not personally avaricious, was cursed with that passion for state, splendour, and magnificence which is so frequently found in a highly imaginative character; and being always plunged in difficulties, he took, with that unscrupulousness too common at the period when he lived, the shortest way to supply his incessant needs.

In 1603, at the beginning of the reign of James I., Bacon was knighted, and appointed successively king's counsel, solicitorgeneral, and attorney-general (the last dignity having been attained in 1613), and he fully justified whatever confidence the court could have placed in his subserviency and pliability: so far indeed had he forgotten the great principles of the law whose unworthy minister he was, that he assisted in inflicting on a certain Paacham, an aged and obscure clergyman, accused of treason, the cruelties of the torture, in order to extort a confession by a means in no way countenanced by the English constitution. It was at this period that Bacon married the daughter of a wealthy alderman, and seems in this, as well as so many other acts of his life, to have consulted interest. He still continued to advance in his career of ambition, and in 1619 reached the highest dignity to

which an English subject can aspire, having been named in that year Lord High Chancellor, with the title of Baron Verulam. This rank he afterwards exchanged, by the protection of Villiersthe vain and haughty favourite of James-for the still more exalted style of Viscount St. Alban's. In this advance he probably received from Villiers the hire for some new obsequiousness to the favourite's power, for he allowed the minister to interfere in the exercise of his high judicial functions-a crime of which he was accused before parliament, and of which (together with many minor instances of corruption) he proclaimed himself guilty in a confession written with his own hand. On being asked by a committee sent for the purpose from the House of Lords, whether he confessed the authenticity and truth of this humiliating avowal, he is reported to have said, with an expression of sorrow and repentance which under any other circumstances would have been deeply touching, "It is my act, my hand, my heart; I beseech your lordships, press not upon a broken reed." Being fully convicted of these grave charges, he was deprived by parliament of the office he had so unworthily prostituted, and sent, with the dark stain of a just condemnation upon him, to finish his life in retirement and disgrace.

He retired to his estates, and, devoting the remainder of his life to those grand speculations which have survived his follies and his crimes, and let us hope also to repentance for his past errors, he died in 1626, deeply in debt, leaving, as he says himself, with a noble sense of the services he had rendered to the human race, “his name and memory to foreign nations, and to mine own country after some time is passed over."

It is singular enough that the death of this great philosopher should have been caused by a cold caught in performing a physical experiment, and that he should have been, not the apostle only, but also the martyr of science. It is related that, travelling by Highgate, near London, in wintry weather, he was struck with the idea that flesh might be preserved by means of snow as well as by salting: he bought a fowl, and, descending from his coach, assisted with his own hands in making an immediate trial of the project by stuffing the hen with snow; and in doing this he is said to have received a chill, which, aggravated by his being immediately put into a damp bed at Lord Arundel's house, caused his death in a very few days. But even when his end was approaching, the great philosopher, with "the ruling passion strong in death," could not forbear communicating to a friend, in a letter which he dictated, being too ill to write himself, that his experiment "had succeeded excellently."

A monument was erected over his grave by his faithful friend and disciple, Sir Thomas Meautys, who was buried at his master's

feet and this monument, executed after the design of Sir Henry Wotton, a man imbued with a taste for Italian art, has a peculiar interest as being a portrait of the philosopher, who is represented in his usual dress, seated in an attitude of profound meditation; and the work bears the appropriate inscription, "Sic sedebat."

Of Bacon's personal manners and demeanour all that we know is calculated to give us a most extraordinary idea of the charms of his conversation and the amiability of his character. Ben Jonson, himself so remarkable for his own wonderful stores of learning and powers of conversation, and who was, too, no very indulgent critic, has expressed his admiration of Bacon's eloquence and ready wit. It is consoling to find that, while the conduct of the politician presents so many points for the severest reprobation of the moralist, the character of the man was as attractive as his intellect was sublime. Bacon was a most profuse and generous master to his dependants; and his flagitious avidity for money may perhaps be as justly attributed to an easiness of temper, preventing him from being able to say "no" to a petitioner, and to those habits of inattention to small matters which so often accompany the literary character, as to the darker vices to which they might be ascribed by severer judges. Osborn, a contemporary writer, most probably gives the result of personal experience in the following description of Bacon's conversational powers :-"In all companies he did appear a good proficient, if not a master, in those arts entertained for the subject of every one's discourse. His most casual talk deserveth to be written. As I have been told, his earliest copies required no great labour to render them competent for the nicest judgment. I have heard him entertain a country lord in the proper terms relating to horses and dogs; and at another time out-cant a London chirurgeon. Nor did an easy falling into argument appear less an ornament in him. The ears of his hearers received more gratification than trouble; and were no less sorry when he came to conclude, than displeased with any who did interrupt him." The learned and amusing Howell calls him " a man of recondite science, born for the salvation of learning, and, I think, the eloquentest that was born in this isle." But of his eloquence we shall be able to give a more exact idea when we come to speak of the style of his writings.

In order to form even an approximative notion respecting the nature and importance of the immense revolution produced in science by the writings of Bacon, it is indispensable to have some general idea of the state of science when he wrote. Vague, general, and superficial eulogiums have done real injury to the fame of this great man; for they have propagated very false notions respecting the nature of the revolution he effected, and respecting the means by which that revolution was brought about.

Among other vulgar errors of this nature, one of the most dangerous is that which consists in considering Bacon as a discoverer, and attributing to him the invention of analysis. This is degrading a great man to the level of a quack. "Bacon's philoso'phy," as D'Alembert profoundly says, was too wise to astonish;" and as to the inductive method of discovering truth, that is as old as Aristotle, or rather as old as human reason itself.

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The simple account of the great Baconian innovation will be substantially as follows. The Aristotelian method had reigned in all the schools and universities of Europe from the period of the revival of letters in the fourteenth century; nay, it may be considered as having existed during the whole period of the dark ages; and thus to have continued in action, with various degrees, it is true, of cultivation and extension, uninterruptedly from the time of Aristotle himself. The acute and disputatious spirit of the ancient Greeks, so ingenious, so inquisitive, so paradoxical, was calculated to abuse the opportunity for idle and fruitless speculation afforded by the general tone of the Aristotelian logic; and this word-catching and quibbling-in short, this habit of arguing to abstract conclusions on insufficient premises-was not likely to diminish among the schools of Alexandria and Byzantium. The perverted ingenuity of the Lower Empire was still further sharpened by the part which the Orientals now began to play in philosophy. The wildest fantasies and irregularities of Eastern subtlety were thus added to the Greek passion for paradox and sophistry, and it was in this state, debased with these admixtures, that the schools of the middle ages received the philosophy of the Stagyrite. Now the monastic spirit was characterised by all the various peculiarities together. It was as dreamy and fantastical as the Oriental genius, as subtle and disputative as the Greek, and as sophistical in its tone as the Alexandrian speculations and to all these sources of corruption was added another, more dangerous than any we have mentioned, in the circumstance of the Aristotelian philosophy being made part of the ecclesiastical system that is to say, the alliance between the theology of Rome and the philosophy of the Lycæum.

Orthodoxy having once taken under her fatal protection a particular system of philosophy, the consequences were equally injurious to the one and the other; for the Church of Rome was thus not only compelled to recognise by her adherence, and protect by her authority, the most false conclusions of the sophical system, but deprived herself (through her assumption of infallibility) of the power of ever renouncing any conclusion, however absurd, which she had once sanctioned. On the other hand, the philosophical system, thus unnaturally connected with religious orthodoxy, became at once timid and extravagant, appealing not