VERULAM. Francis Bαcον, Viscount St. Albans, and Baron Verulam. This illustrious man was born in London, on the 22d day of January 1561. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, a courtier, a lawyer, and a man of erudition, stood high in the favour of Queen Elizabeth, and was lord-keeper during twenty years of her reign. Anne, the second wife of Sir Nicholas, and the philosopher’s mother, was the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, Edward the Sixth’s tutor, and was herself distinguished among the learned females of the time. One of her sisters became the wife of Elizabeth’s celebrated treasurer, Lord Burleigh. Delicate in health, and devoted to sedentary employment, Francis Bacon exhibited in early boyhood the dawning of those powers whose versatility afterwards became not less remarkable than their strength. As a child he delighted the queen with his precocious gravity and readiness of speech; and before he had completed his twelfth year we see him investigating the cause of a singular echo in a conduit, and endeavouring to penetrate the mystery of a juggler who performed in his father’s house. At the age of thirteen he was matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which Whitgift was then master; but his residence at the university lasted scarcely three years, and his writings contain many expressions of dissatisfaction with the current system of academical education. In his sixteenth year he was sent abroad, and lived for some time at Paris, under the charge of the English ambassador, Sir Amias Paulett; after which he visited the French provinces, and added to his literary and philosophical studies an acquaintance with foreign policy and statistics, the fruit of which soon appeared in his tract upon the State of Europe. In February 1580, his father died, and he immediately returned to England.
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Sir Nicholas left but a scanty fortune; and his son Francis, the youngest of a large family, found himself obliged, in his twentieth year, to devise the means of earning a livelihood. One would have thought powerful friends could not have been wanting to one who, besides his own acknowledged merit, had it in his power to urge the long and honourable services of his father, while his uncle was the prime minister of the kingdom. Of the patronage which thus seemed to be at his command, Bacon attempted to avail himself, desiring to obtain such a public employment as might enable him to unite political activity in some degree with literary study. But his suit was received neglectfully by the queen, and harshly repulsed by his kinsman. Although all the causes of this conduct may not be discoverable, a few lie at the surface. The lord-keeper had, in the later years of his life, lost the royal favour. Burleigh, besides his notorious contempt for men of letters, had to provide for sons of his own, to whom their accomplished cousin might have proved a dangerous rival. From the Cecils, indeed, Bacon never derived any efficient aid, till he had forced his way upwards in spite of them; and there arc evident traces of jealousy and dislike in the mode in which he was treated both by the old treasurer, and by his second son, Robert

Obliged therefore to betake himself to the law, Bacon was admitted at Gray’s Inn, where he spent several years obscurely in the study of his profession, but with increasing practice at the bar. The friendship of his fellow lawyers, earned by his amiable disposition and his activity in the affairs of the society, bestowed on him offices in his inn of court; but his kinsmen were still cold and haughty. Lord Burleigh continued to write him letters of reproof; and Robert Cecil, already a rising statesman, sneered at speculative intellects, and insinuated their unfitness for the business of life. In 1590, when Bacon was in his thirtieth year, he was visited for the first time with court-favour, receiving then an honorary appointment as queen’s counsel extraordinary; and to this was added a grant of the reversion of a clerkship in the star-chamber, which did not become vacant for eighteen years. But the lawyer’s heart was not in his task. His brilliant professional success, and the awakening friendship of his relations, merely suggested to him renewed attempts to escape from the drudgery of the bar. His views are nobly expressed in a letter which he addressed to the lord-treasurer the year after his appointment.^[1. “I wax now somewhat ancient: one-and-thirty years is a great deal of sand ill the hour-glass. My health, I thank God, I find confirmed, and I do not fear that action shall impair it; because I account my ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are· I ever bear a mind, in some middle place that I could discharge, to serve her majesty; not as a man born under Sol that loveth honour, nor under Jupiter that loveth business, for the contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly; but as a man born under an excellent sovereign, that deserveth the dedication of all men’s abilities. . . . Again, the meanness of my estate doth somewhat move me; for, though I cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get. Lastly, I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends; for I haut taken all knowledge to be my province; and, if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers,—whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments, and auricular traditions and impostures, have committed so many spoils,—I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries; the best state of that province. This, whether it be curiosity, or vain glory, or nature, or (if one take it more favourably) philanthropia, is so fixed in my mind, as it cannot be removed. . . . And if your lordship will not carry me on, I will not do as Anaxagoras did, who reduced himself with contemplation into voluntary poverty: but this 1 will do,—I will sell the inheritance that I have, and purchase some lease of quick revenue, or some office of gain, that shall be executed by deputy; and so give over all care of service, and became some sorry bookmaker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth, which, he said, lay so deep."— (Cabala, p 18. Bacon’s Works, vol xii. p. 6, 7. Montagu’s edit.) ] We linger with melancholy pleasure over these abortive efforts made by one of the finest and most capacious of intellects to extricate itself from that labyrinth of worldly turmoil, in which its owner was destined to purchase rank and splendour at the expense of moral degradation and final ruin.

We are henceforth to behold Bacon actively engaged in political life, as well as in the duties of his profession. Two parties then divided the court, equally remarkable in different ways on account of those who headed them. Burleigh was the chief of the queen’s old counsellors, on whom, amidst all her caprices, she always had the prudence to rely for the real business of the state: the young and gay, those who aspired to be ranked as the personal friends or adorers of the withered sovereign of hearts, were led by the high-spirited and imprudent Earl of Essex. To the party of this nobleman Bacon decidedly attached himself, and soon indeed shared with his own elder brother Anthony, the earl’s most private confidence. Valuable advisers were they to their rash patron; and a valuable servant of the nation did Francis Bacon bid fair to become, when, in November 1592, he entered parliament as one of the knights of the shire for Middlesex. His first speech, in February following, contained an urgent pleading for improvements in the law; in another address, delivered in March, he resisted, with exceeding boldness as well as force of reason, the immediate levying of an unpopular subsidy to which the House had already consented. The young lawyer’s exposition of unpleasant truths gave deep offence to the queen. His uncle and the lord-keeper were both commissioned to convey to him the assurance of the royal displeasure; and the two humble, nay, crouching letters of apology, still extant, in which he entreated those ministers to procure his pardon, did not forebode much independence in his subsequent conduct. We do not, indeed, again hear Bacon named as a champion of popular rights.

In the year 1594, Sir Edward Coke being made attorney-gencral, the solicitorship became vacant; and Bacon’s application for the office was strenuously supported by Essex. But all efforts were in vain. The powerful kinsmen were colder than ever towards one who had chosen another patron. The lord-keeper, Puckering, acted in a manner which drew on him a spirited rebuke from the candidate. The queen hesitated, coquetted, told Essex that his friend, though witty, eloquent, and in some branches learned, was a showy lawyer rather than a profound one. After a delay of many months, the place was given to a plodding serjeant; and Bacon’s generous patron, vexed at the disappointment of his hopes, sought to console both him and himself by a gift equally munificent and delicate. Bacon received from him an estate at Twickenham, worth about eighteen hundred pounds. The present, in all likelihood, came very seasonably; for he appears to have been already involved in those pecuniary embarrassments from which he was never afterwards completely able to extricate himself. He was obliged to sell the land which Essex had given him; two years later he was arrested in the street for a debt of three hundred pounds; and among the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere’s papers, recently published, there is a curious acknowledgment, granted in 1604, for a pledge in security of an advance of fifty pounds to him. These reasons offer the only apology for the addresses which, about the time of his arrest, he paid to a wealthy and shrewish widow, who, fortunately for him, preferred his professional brother and personal enemy, Sir Edward Coke. In the meantime, his legal reputation continued to increase, and his parliamentary exertions were unremitted, though altogether free from that independence which had once characterized them. We thus trace Bacon down to his thirty-ninth[7:21:607] year, pausing only to remark, that two years earlier, that is, in 1597, his celebrated Essays were first published. Although merely the skeleton of what they afterwards became, these compositions gained high reputation for their author, not only at home, but also on the continent.

After this, the first step in Bacon’s literary career, we approach what is the most painful task of his biographer, a dark page of his history, over which no ingenuity has ever been able to throw a veil thick enough to disguise its foulness. We have seen him the friend, the adviser, the grateful vassal of Essex; we are now to behold him deserting his benefactor, assisting to destroy him, standing forth in the face of the world as his enemy and accuser. The philosopher’s latest biographer has pronounced his conduct in this matter to be honourable and praiseworthy; and to his pages we must refer those who are curious to canvass arguments of which we are ourselves unable to discover the force. Bacon, unfortunately for himself, had lately risen much in royal favour, and been greatly trusted and employed. Accordingly, in the first stages of Essex’s decline, he had to act a double part,—now offering to his patron advices which were but seldom followed, now seeking excuses to pacify the queen’s rising displeasure. His natural inclination for temporizing, the success which had hitherto attended his cautious policy, the honest wish to serve his generous friend,— all these reasons may have concurred in tempting him to embark in the dangerous channel. But the sunken rocks soon encompassed him, and shipwreck was unavoidable. Alienation either from Elizabeth or from Essex speedily appeared to be the necessary result of the position into which the parties were coming. Bacon had not the courage to take the nobler part, and place himself by the side of his falling friend, at the probable expense of all his worldly prospects. Suspicion and estrangement soon took the place of affectionate confidence; and the trust reposed in him by the queen was purchased by the bitter consciousness that Essex regarded him as treacherous and hostile. A more degrading task was yet to come The first trial of the earl, in reference to his conduct in Ireland, was determined upon; and Bacon’s enemies asserted that he offered himself to act as one of the counsel for the prosecution. In that memoir in defence of his conduct which he wrote in the next reign, and which proves satisfactorily nothing but his own humiliating consciousness of guilt, he states as to this matter what was doubtless the truth. It had been resolved that the proceedings against the rash earl should not be carried out to his destruction, but should only disarm and discourage him; and, a hint being conveyed to Bacon that the queen had not determined whether he should be employed professionally in the affair or not, he thought proper to address to her “two or three words of compliment,” intimating that if she would dispense with his services he would consider it as one of her greatest favours, but that otherwise he knew his duty, and would not allow any private obligations to interfere with what he owed to her majesty. All this was, he adds, “a respect no man that had his wits could have omitted.” Bacon, in short, still wished to serve two masters; but he had now placed himself at the mercy of those from whom he had no forbearance to expect. The queen, suspicious and moody, was jealous of his attachment to Essex, and bent on compelling him to do het service unreservedly: her advisers, or some of them, were glad to have the odium of the earl’s destruction shared with them by one so distinguished, who had. likewise, been the victim’s friend. It was intimated that Bacon’s services could not be dispensed with; but he tells us, (and he probably repeats only what his masters tried to make him believe), that it was resolved his share in the prosecution should be confined to matters which could not do his unfortunate patron any serious harm. Essex’s private censure by the privy-council followed; and, while he was committed to custody-at-large, Bacon incurred, by his appearance against him, an obloquy of which his letters show him to have been painfully sensible. In a few months the earl’s open rebellion took place; he was seized, and put upon his trial in February 1601, along with Lord Southampton; and on this occasion, when his life was at stake, Bacon again appeared as one of the counsel for the prosecution, and delivered a speech of which there is extant an imperfect account. The language is harsh, but less so than addresses of the kind used to be in those days. The topics are oratorical, and, as it has been justly remarked, are less calculated for ensuring conviction (which indeed was certain) than for placing the conduct of the prisoner in an odious light, and hardening the queen’s heart against him; and, although it would be rash to judge of the real temper of the harangue without knowing more of its contents, yet what we possess contains much that cannot possibly be explained so as to do credit to the speaker. We know, likewise, how the object of the attack received it. At one place Essex interrupted his treacherous friend, and called upon him to say, as a witness, whether he had not, in their confidential intercourse, admitted the truth of those excuses which he now affected to treat as frivolous and false. Essex was convicted; and between his sentence and execution, Bacon admits in his exculpatory memoir that he made no attempt to save him; seeing the queen but once, as he says, and on that occasion venturing to do nothing further than pronouncing a few common-places on the blessed uses of mercy. But not even here was the disgrace to end, in which the timid man of the world had steeped himself. The act which had cost Elizabeth’s own heart so much, had also made her unpopular; a defence of the royal policy in regard to Essex was thought necessary, and the pen that drew it up, under the direction of the queen’s advisers, was, we are grieved to find, no other than Bacon’s. The “Declaration of the Practices and Treasons attempted and committed by Robert Earl of Essex,” was printed, and is extant: “a performance,” says a late writer, “in defence of which, in the succeeding reign, Bacon had not a word to say; a performance abounding in expressions which no generous enemy would have employed respecting a man who had so dearly expiated his offences.” With this humiliating act of service we may consider Bacon’s public life under Elizabeth as closed.

The reign of her successor was, from its commencement, a more auspicious era for men of letters and philosophy, with whom James, amidst all his imbecility and cold-heart-edness, was not by any means ill fitted to sympathise. Bacon’s learning was no longer open to sneers and contempt; his uncle was dead; his hunchback cousin, Robert Cecil, who soon became Earl of Salisbury, was kept in check by his hereditary prudence; and Coke, who had insulted our philosophic lawyer grossly, as he insulted every one who was defenceless and Within his reach, was in a few years removed to the head of the court of common pleas. From the first hour of James’s reign, Bacon lost no opportunity of recommending himself to favour; but the first mark of it which he received, was orte of which he neither was nor could have been proud, and which, nevertheless, he thought proper to solicit. When the king called upon all persons possessing forty pounds a year in land to be knighted, or to compound for a dispensation from the honour, one effect of this scheme for filling the royal coffers was, that three members of Bacon’s mess at Gray’s Inn appeared among the new knights. That love of external distinctions which was the fatal weakness of his nature, was called into play, and the philosopher was disconcerted by the titles of his companions, beside whom he sat untitled. At the same time, likewise, he had, in his own words, “found out an alderman’s daughter, a handsome maiden, to his liking and the alderman’s daughter was likely to be more easily won if her admirer could offer her [7:21:608]a showy accession of rank. Accordingly, Bacon wrote to his cousin Cecil, stating his desire to obtain, for these reasons, “this divulged and almost prostituted title of knighthood." The request was granted, but was immediately followed by another. Bacon, heartily ashamed of the company in which he was to appear, entreated that he might be knighted alone; “that,” as he says, “the manner might be such as might grace one, since the matter will not.” This petition was refused; and, on the day of the coronation, Francis Bacon was one of three hundred who received the empty honour. Soon afterwards, being forty-two years old, he was married to the alderman’s daughter, Alice Barnham, who brought him a considerable fortune, but seems, in the latter part of his life at all events, to have contributed little to his domestic happiness.

These details are in themselves trifles; but they are strange illustrations of the mixed character of one who, while thus soliciting honours of which he was half-ashamed, and eager for public distinctions, which, though more solid, were likewise more dangerous, was not only respected and distinguished as a lawyer and a statesman, as an orator, a scholar, and an author, but was occupied, during his few hours of leisure, in completing the most valuable system of philosophy that has ever been expounded in modern Europe. Smaller compositions, submitted to his friends, showed from time to time the progress of the great work which he had marked out as the business of his life; and among these was the treatise on the Advancement of Learning, published in 1605, in its author’s forty-fifth year. Political tracts alternated with these philosophical speculations.

In the mean time his public reputation, and his favour with the king, increased and kept pace with each other. In parliament he was actively useful in forwarding favourite and really good measures of the court, such as the union of England and Scotland, and the proposed consolidation of the laws of the two countries; nor was he less usefully employed in taking a prominent part in the select committee of the house upon grievances. In his skilful hands, the report became all that the rulers could have wished, without exciting any general feeling against the framers. In 1604, he was made king’s counsel in ordinary, with a salary of forty pounds, to which was added a pension of sixty pounds. In 1607, upon Coke’s promotion to the bench, Bacon was appointed solicitor-general; and he became attorney-general in 1612. His treatises concerning improvements in the law, and the principles of legislation, are more creditable testimonies to the value of his official services than some others of his acts; such as the scheme, first tried in the session of 1614, for securing majorities in the House of Commons by organised corruption, the invention of which has been recently traced to him, although in his place in parliament he ridiculed those who asserted that such a project bad ever been formed. Bacon was likewise officially the prosecutor of Oliver St. John, of Owen and Talbot, and of the old clergyman Peacham, who was examined in the Tower under torture, the founder of modern philosophy being present, and putting the questions. In Peacham’s case there was even an attempt, actively promoted by Bacon, for securing a conviction by previous conference with the judges; a plot which, though at length successful, was defeated for a time by the sturdy resistance of Coke, a tyrant to his inferiors, but a staunch opponent of encroachments upon judicial independence. Bacon’s last remarkable appearance as attorney-general, was in the noted trial of the earl and countess of Somerset and their accomplices, for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury; and, whatever the foul secret may have been, which was involved in that fiendish intrigue, Bacon’s letters to the king leave little reason for doubting that he at least was in possession of it. His conduct in this matter however gained him great and deserved credit.

The fall of Somerset was followed by the rise of the new favourite Villiers, who had already profited by his intimacy with the attorney-general, and by the sound advices with which the cautious statesman endeavoured to fortify his youth and inexperience. The worthless Buckingham, destined in a few years to be the instrument of retribution for Bacon’s past desertion of Essex, did not for some time forget obligations, of which he was probably wise enough to desire a continuance. In 1616 Bacon having been sworn of the privy council, relinquished the bar, but retained his chamber practice. In the spring of 1617, the Lord Chancellor Ellesmere resigned the seals, which were immediately delivered to Bacon, with the title of lord-keeper. In January of the succeeding year he was made lord high chancellor of England, and in July was raised to the peerage as Baron of Verulam. His higher title of Viscount St. Albans was not conferred on him till 1621. Without neglecting his political duties, he proceeded zealously to the judicial functions of his office, in which arrears of business had accumulated through the infirmities of his aged predecessor. “This day,” wrote he to Buckingham in June 1617, “I have made even with the business of the kingdom for common justice; not one cause unheard; the lawyers drawn dry of all the motions they were to make; not one petition unanswered. And this, I think, could not be said in our age before. Thus I speak, not out of ostentation, but out of gladness, when I have done my duty. I know men think I cannot continue, if I should thus oppress myself with business; but that account is made. The duties of life are more than life: and if I die now, I shall die before the world be weary of me.” And the man who wrote in this solemn moral strain, the man whose writings throughout are an echo of the same lofty expression of the sense of duty, was also the man who, in less than four years after his elevation to the seat of justice, was to be hurled from it in disgrace, branded as a bribed and dishonest man. “At York House,” says Mr. Montagu, “on the 22d of January 1621, he celebrated his sixtieth birthday, surrounded by his admirers and friends, among whom was Ben Jonson, who composed a poem in honour of the day.

Hail, happy genius of this ancient pile!

How comes it all things so about thee smile— The fire, the wine, the men—and in the midst Thou stand’st, as if some mystery thou didst?

“Had the poet been a prophet, he would have described the good genius of the mansion not exulting, but dejected, humble, and about to depart for ever.”

He had now arrived at the conviction that his worship of the powers of this world had made it impossible for him to consummate the great sacrifice, which, during his lifetime, he had hoped to lay upon the altar of philosophy. Aged sixty years, and immersed in difficult and anxious business, he felt that his great Restoration of Science, his Instauratio Magna, could not be completed; and he therefore hastened to give to the world an outline of its plan, coupled with a filling up of one section of the outline. “I number my days,” wrote he, “and would have it saved.” The Novum Organum, the result of this determination, was published in October 1620; and the fame which it earned for its author throughout Europe, was in its rising splendour when his fall took place.

The tempest which was soon to overturn the throne was already lowering on the horizon; and its earliest mutterings were heard in the important parliament which met on the 30th of January 1621. With most of the complaints, whose investigation the king and Buckingham feared so much, we have here little to do: but two gross abuses there were, in which the lord chancellor was personally implicated. He had passed the infamous patents of monopoly, of which the worst were those held by Sir Giles Mompesson, (Massinger’s Overreach,) and by Sir Francis Michell, and shared by Buckingham’s brothers and dependents: and he had allowed himself to be influenced in his judicial sentences by re [7:21:609]commendations of the favourite. The first of these faults admitted of palliation, the second was susceptible of none; but both were real and heavy offences. Yet neither of them was made an article of charge against Bacon. He was attacked upon a different ground. Buckingham, by the advice of his new counsellor Williams, then dean of Westminster, abandoned the monopolists to their fate, contenting himself with sending his own brothers out of the country, and with afterwards publicly denying that he had any hand in assisting their escape. But the storm was not allayed. In March, the parliamentary committee appointed to inquire into the existence of abuses in the courts of justice, reported that abuses did exist, and that the person against whom they were alleged, was the lord chancellor himself. Two cases were specified, of suitors named Aubrey and Egerton, of whom the one had given the chancellor L.100, the other L.400, and against whom he had decided, notwithstanding these presents. Two days after this report was presented, Lord St. Albans presided in the House of Lords for the last time. New accusations accumulated against him; and, alarmed in mind, and sick in body, he retired from the house, and addressed to the peers a letter, praying for a suspension of their opinion, until he should have undergone a fair trial. In no long time the charges against him amounted to twenty-three; and Williams, again called to the councils of Buckingham and his master, advised that no risks should be incurred upon his account. A prorogation of parliament ensued, during which an interview took place between the king and the chancellor; and James, instead of encouraging his accused servant in the resolution he had expressed of defending himself, recommended “that he should submit himself to the House of Peers, and that upon his princely word he would then restore him again, if they in their honours should not be sensible of his merits.” On the 24th of April there was presented to the Lords, by the Prince of Wales, a supplication and submission of the lord chancellor, in which the most important passage is the following: “It resteth, therefore, that, without fig-leaves, I do ingenuously confess and acknowledge that, having understood the particulars of the charge, not formally from the house, but enough to inform my conscience and memory, I find matter sufficient and full, both to move me to desert my defence, and to move your lordships to condemn and censure me. Neither will I trouble your lordships by singling those particulars, which I think may fall off.

Quid to exempts juvat spinis de pluribus una?

Neither will I prompt your lordships to observe upon the proofs, where they come not home, or the scruples touching the credits of the witnesses: neither will I represent unto your lordships how far a defence might, in diverse things, extenuate the offence, in respect of the time or manner of the gift, or the like circumstances; but only leave these things to spring out of your own noble thoughts, and observations of the evidence and examinations themselves, and charitably to wind about the particulars of the charge here and there, as God shall put in your minds; and so submit myself wholly to your piety and grace And, there fore, my humble suit to your lordships is, that my penitent submission may be my sentence, and the loss of the seal my punishment; and that your lordships will spare any further sentence, but recommend me to his majesty’s grace and pardon for all that is past.” But not even thus was the humiliation complete. The house resolved that the submission was not specific, nor unequivocal enough to be satisfactory; and that he should be required to furnish categorical answers to the several articles of charge, which, accordingly, were sent to him, being numbered under twenty-three heads. The specific answers which he returned were prefaced and followed by these declarations: “Upon advised consideration of the charge, descending into my own conscience, and call ing my memory to account, so far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence, and put myself upon the grace and mercy of your lordships This declaration I have made to your lordships with a sincere mind; humbly craving that, if there should be any mistakes, your lordships would impute it to want of memory, and not to any desire of mine to obscure truth, or palliate anything. For I do again confess, that in the points charged upon me, although they should be taken as myself have declared them, there is a great deal of corruption and neglect, for which I am heartily and penitently sorrow, and submit myself to the judgment, grace, and mercy of the court.—For extenuation, I will use none, concerning the matters themselves: only it may please your lordships, out of your nobleness, to cast your eyes of compassion upon my person and estate. I was never noted for an avaricious man, and the apostle saith, that covetousness is the root of all evil. I hope also that your lordships do the rather find me in the state of grace; tor that, in all these particulars, there are few or none that are not almost two years old, whereas those that have an habit of corruption do commonly wax worse and worse; so that it hath pleased God to prepare me, by precedent degrees of amendment, to my present penitency. And for my estate. It is so mean and poor, as my care is now chiefly to satisfy my debts.”

This declaration being read, a deputation of the lords was appointed to wait on the unfortunate man in the chamber where he sat deserted and alone, and to demand whether it were his own hand that was subscribed to it. Among them was Shakspeare’s friend Lord Southampton, who had been condemned to death along with Essex. Bacon replied to them, “It is my act, my hand, my heart. I beseech your lordships, be merciful unto a broken reed.” Again the fallen judge prayed the king to intercede for him; and again the king, his haughty son, and their thankless favourite, refused to interfere. On the 3d of May 1621, the lords pronounced a sentence which, stamping him at all events with indelible disgrace, was terrible even in the punishment which it actually inflicted. Bacon, found guilty upon his own confession, was sentenced to a fine of forty thousand pounds, and to confinement in the Tower during the king’s pleasure; he was pronounced incapable of public employments, and of sitting in parliament; and prohibited from coming within the verge of the court. His judges indeed knew that the harsher part of the sentence would not be executed. Accordingly, though committed immediately to the Tower, he was released after two days’ imprisonment; and the fine was remitted in the course of the autumn, although it is a fact dishonourable (in the circumstances) to his enemy and successor Bishop Williams, that the pardon was stayed at the seal, till the king in person ordered it to be passed.

From the whole tenor of this afflicting history. It is plain that Bacon’s memory cannot be cleared from very heavy imputations. Indeed, the case against him may be stated, if we push it to the utmoβt, in an alternative form which admits of no honourable solution. Convicted of corruption, as he was, upon his own confession, we must either believe the confession, and pronounce him a corrupt judge, or we must disbelieve it, and pronounce him a liar. Most of his biographers adopt the former alternative. Mr. Montagu’s elaborate defence is really founded on something which is not very far distant from the latter. And, humiliating as either supposition is, we have, for our own part, no hesitation in believing that the truth lies nearest to that theory which imputes to the unhappy chancellor insincerity and cowardice rather than wilful corruption. We cannot indeed go so far as his enthusiastic biographer, who insists that the acts charged and confessed, were in themselves, if not quite free from moral blame, yet palliated, not only by general usage, [7:21:610]but by intentions strictly honest;—that he was sacrificed by the king and the king’s minion, although, if he had stood a trial, he could have obtained a full acquittal. This, we must venture to think, is a position which, if maintained to its whole extent, cannot be even plausibly defended. Neither, as we must also believe, is justice done by that other view, which has been stated more recently with such force and eloquence, that the case was one of gross bribery, gross and glaring even when compared with the ordinary course of corruption in these times; a case so bad, that the court, anxious, for their own sakes, to save the culprit, dared not to utter a word in extenuation.^[2. Montagu’s Life of Bacon, Works, vol. xvi. part 1. pp. 313—377, note. Edinburgh Review, vol. lxv. p. 50—63. ]

The fact which possesses the greatest importance for the elucidation of this unfortunate story, is that which has been founded on so elaborately by Mr. Montagu, and lately illustrated further by another writer for a different purpose.^[3. Edinburgh Review, No. 143, p. 38, 39. Life of Raleigh. ] The custom of giving presents was then general, not to say universal, in England. It extended much farther than the épices of the French parliaments; for the gifts were not fixed in amount, nor, though always expected, were they recognised as lawful perquisites. The advisers of the crown received presents from those who asked for favours: the sovereign received presents from those who approached the throne on occasions of pomp and festivity. Both these improprieties were not only universal but unchallenged. Further, judges received presents; and under certain conditions,—when, for instance, the giver had not been, and was not likely to be, a suitor in the judge’s court, or even when, though he had been a suitor, the cause was ended,—this dangerous abuse was scarcely less common than the other, and scarcely regarded in a more unfavourable light. That it was wrong, all men felt; but we fear there were few indeed, who, like Sir Thomas More, refused absolutely to profit by it. High as Coke himself stood for honesty, and well as he deserved praise for this (almost his only redeeming virtue), we doubt whether his judicial character could have emerged quite untainted from a scrutiny led by common informers, discarded servants, and disappointed litigants, like that to which his unfortunate rival was subjected. Pure Bacon was not; purer than he, several of his contemporaries probably were; but we believe him to have been merely one of the offenders, and very far indeed from being the worst, in an age when corruption and profligacy, senatorial, judicial, and administrative, were almost at the acme of that excess which an indignant nation speedily rose to exterminate and to avenge.

A comparison of the charges in detail, and of the evidence adduced, with Bacon’s articulate answers, as to the candour of which there is no reason to doubt, would really exhibit little or nothing which, after fair allowances are made for imperfect information and other causes of obscurity, would afford a distinct contradiction to the chancellor’s own solemn averment, made in a letter to the king at an early stage of the investigation. “For the briberies and gifts wherewith I am charged, when the book of hearts shall be opened, I hope I shall not be found to have the troubled fountain of a corrupt heart, in a depraved habit of taking rewards to pervert justice; howsoever I may be frail, and partake of the abuses of the times." While he lay in the Tower, he addressed to Buckingham a letter containing these expressions: “However I have acknowledged that the sentence is just, and for reformation sake fit, I have been a trusty, and honest, and Christ-loving friend to your lordship, and the justest chancellor that hath been in the five changes since my father’s time." This last sentence, indeed, when carefully weighed, will be found to contain more of truth than the writer himself perhaps intended. A judge not altogether unjust he may have been, if we compare him with his contemporaries; but he was also a trusty, and trusting, and servile friend of the royal favourite, and of other men in power. He was a lover of the pomp of the world, to an extent highly dangerous for one who had but little private fortune, insufficient official remuneration, and habits which disqualified him for exercising a strict superintendence over the expenses of his household, or the conduct of his dependents generally. His emoluments as chancellor did not amount to three thousand pounds a-year; and, immediately on his appointment, he had used vain endeavours to have the office put on a more independent footing. His servants habitually betrayed both him and the suitors; but there can be no doubt that, continually embarrassed in circumstances, he himself was only too glad to receive the customary gifts when they could be taken with any semblance of propriety. As to his confession, while we believe it to be true in every particular instance, we believe it also in its general admission of corruption; but we likewise believe that the general admission ought to have been qualified by certain references, which would have established the truth of a remark made by Bacon in his hour of deepest suffering, that “they upon whom the wall fell were not the greatest offenders in Israel.” And this, as we conceive it, was the danger which the court were so eager to avert, the danger which filled the king and Buckingham with such dismay. This was their reason for insisting that Bacon should sacrifice his own character, and abandon that line of defence which might not improbably have precipitated the revolution. Upon this assumption, their conduct throughout is intelligible and consistent; and, although one is reluctant to believe it, the assumption is not contradicted by any thing in the chancellor’s character. Lofty as may still have been his abstract notions of morality, his practical views were darkened and debased by his long servitude to public office in a corrupt age. The stain which, as he well knew, the sentence of the parliament would affix upon his name, may have seemed a light thing to one who was aware how the same brand might have been justly imprinted on almost every eminent name in the kingdom. And again, neither Bacon nor his master, nor those others who were the royal advisers, were able to comprehend, in this instance, any more than elsewhere, the spirit which had already gone abroad. They did not anticipate the severity of the sentence pronounced by the House of Lords; still less did they anticipate (Bacon at least did not, nor perhaps did Williams) the universal indignation which was aroused by the fact that the highest judge in the realm had been displaced for bribery. The court gained its immediate purpose, in removing to a subsequent time the fatal struggle; but there soon arrived the fulfilment of Bacon’s prophecy, that the successful attack on him would be but an encouragement and strengthening to those who aimed at the throne itself.

After his release from the Tower, Bacon, although strangely anxious to continue in London, was obliged to retire to his paternal seat of Gorhambury, near St. Albans. There he immediately commenced his History of Henry the Seventh, a work displaying but too unequivocal proofs of the dejected lassitude which had crept upon his mind. Early in next year he offered himself unsuccessfully for the provostship of Eton College, and proceeded with other literary undertakings. These included the completion of the celebrated treatise, “De Augmentis,” an improvement of the older work on the Advancement of Learning. This was the last philosophical treatise which he published; although the few remaining years of his life were incessantly devoted to study and composition, and gave birth to the New Atlantis, the Sylva Sylvarum, and other works of less consequence.
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Shortly before the king’s death, he remitted the whole of the sentence on Bacon, who, however, did not again sit in parliament. His health was already broken; and in December of that year, 1625, he made his will, in which, although his affairs were really in extreme confusion, he writes as if he considered himself a wealthy man. In the spring of 1626, on his way from Gray’s Inn to Gorhambury, he exposed himself to a sudden chill, by performing in a cottage an experiment which had suggested itself to him, regarding the fitness of snow or ice as a substitute for salt in preserving dead flesh. Unable to travel home, he was carried to the earl of Arundel’s house at Highgate, where, after seven days’ illness, he died early in the morning of Easter Sunday, the 9th of April, in the sixty-sixth year of his age. In obedience to his will, he was buried in the same grave with his mother, in St. Michael’s church, near St. Albans.

It is sad beyond expression to turn to those reflections which are suggested by the life of this great man, however leniently one may be disposed to regard his weaknesses. He who founded the philosophy of modern Europe, he who brought down philosophy from heaven to earth, disentangling it from airy abstractions, and anchoring it on practical truths,—he who aided science alike by his improvements on its procedure, and his enlarged views of its end and aim, indicating observation of individual truths as the only sure guide to universal conclusions, and practical utility as the only quality which makes such conclusions worth the labour they cost,—he who did all this, was destined to furnish by his own pitiable example, a pregnant illustration of the great principles which his writings taught. A slave to the world and its vanities, he was betrayed by the evil genius whom he served. Unable to subject reason, and passion, and imagination, to the stern control of the moral sense, he expiated, by a life of discomfort and dependence, ending in an old age of sorrow and disgrace, the sin of having misapprehended the mighty rule, which alone can save the empire of the mind from becoming a scene like ancient chaos.

Bacon’s philosophy has been analysed in other parts of this work, and on his literary character we have left ourselves no space to enlarge. We can only remark the powerful effect which his singular versatility of talents exercised over the dissemination of his scientific views. “The reputation which Bacon had acquired from his Essays," says a late writer, “a work early translated into various foreign languages,—his splendid talents as an orator,—and his prominent place in public life,—were circumstances strongly calculated to attract the curiosity of the learned world to his philosophical writings.” And these writings in themselves partake admirably of the character belonging to their author’s works of a different class. Philosophy has seldom made herself more attractive; never has she made herself equally so in communicating lessons of such sterling value. If the works of this wonderful man were worthless as repositories of scientific thought and knowledge, they would still demand reverential study. A masterly eloquence, a union of diversified qualities of style in the highest sense of the word, distinguished even the earlier among them, and entitled those which were produced in the writer’s maturer years, to rank, notwithstanding the faults they share with all prose compositions of their time, as monuments nowhere excelled in the compass of English literature.^[4. Montagu’s Life of Bacon, Works, vol. xvi. parts 1 and 2, 1834. Edinburgh Review, vol. lxv. No. 132. article I. Stewart and Playfair, in the Preliminary Dissertations to this Encyclopaedia. Napier on the Scope and Influence of the Philosophical Writings of Lord Bacon; in the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, vol. viii. part 2, 1818. ] (b. l.)