cious, obstinate without being strong, embittered by early struggles with Calvinist and democrat without ever having attempted to conceive their point of view, he was from the first out of sympathy with the English people, suspicious of Parliament, and irritably fickle toward his immediate supporters. He was always the Scotch inheritor, unadapted and unadaptable, a stranger in a strange land.

Paradoxical as it may appear, Francis Bacon, the already determined renovator of learning and founder of a new philosophy, sought eagerly for the favour of James and his court. He wrote to Lord Southampton, who, condemned with Essex, had been released but lately from the Tower, "I may safely be that to you now, which I was truly before;" to the Earl of Northumberland, "If I may be of any use to your Lordship, by my head, tongue, pen, means, or friends, I humbly pray you to hold me your own;" and to Cecil, "I pray you, as you find time let him know that he is the personage in the State which I love. most." Mistaken as his motive may seem to have been, it was an honourable one. His desire to serve James locally was conditioned precisely upon his desire to serve humanity universally. That a human being, limited, finite, matter-bound, can achieve high success in pure scholarship, intellectual leadership, and political office alike, Bacon evidently believed possible, and, in his case, even necessary. Place and power, he felt, must become the commanding platform from which his voice should carry con

m

viction to worldly and unworldly, an unrestricted
audience. In a note concerning himself attached
in Latin Ms. to his treatise on the "Interpretation
of Nature," and translated by his admirable if too
partial biographer, James Spedding, he declares that
he finds himself fitted for nothing so well as for the
study of truth; "as having a mind nimble and ver-
satile enough to catch the resemblances of things.
and at the same time steady enough to fix and dis-
tinguish their subtler differences; as being gifted by
nature with desire to seek, patience to doubt, fond-
ness to meditate, slowness to assert, readiness to
reconsider, carefulness to dispose and set in order;
and as being a man that neither affects what is new
nor admires what is old, and that hates every kind
of imposture." Because, however, of early training;
and because of an instinctive patriotism; "and be-
cause I hoped that, if I rose to any place of honour
in the State, I should have a larger command of in-
dustry and ability to help me in my work; for these
reasons I both applied myself to acquire the arts of
civil life, and commended my service, so far as in
modesty and honesty I might, to the favour of such
friends as had any influence. In which also I had
another motive: for I felt that those things I have
spoken of be they great or small reach no further
than the condition and culture of this mortal life; and
I was not without hope . . . that if I came to hold
office in the State, I might get something done too
for the good of men's souls."

No one can read these words and doubt their sincerity. If Bacon's political life seem to us of to-day a serious waste of effort, it did not at least so appear to Bacon, or even to those few intimate friends who knew something of his deeper life. Rank, fortune, power, property all these, he thought, might serve variously as props, or even as ballast, to the life of the man-in-himself; and it is not singular, therefore, that, thus thinking, he was able at last, when stripped of these accessories, still to face the future with equanimity of soul. If he felt too strongly that he could spare nothing, that he must convert all things into aids, he nevertheless was able to discriminate between aid and aim. He believed himself wise enough and strong enough to handle for noble ends tools whose knack or trick lesser men than he knew much better. For a time he almost succeeded, but at last "affairs" ruined him. He "fell," and yet in that very catastrophe we can see the seeds of his ultimate recognition as a statesman who strove honestly to understand and elevate the life of his country. He had to contend with personal enmity and vague popular discontent on the one hand, and with a crass absolutism on the other. When he saw himself tactically outflanked and surrounded, he yielded perforce, yet it is incredible that he felt his surrender to be an ineffaceable disgrace, as a mere opportunist must have done.

James summoned his first Parliament March 19, 1604, and Bacon, as a Commoner for the borough of

Ipswich, became an active speaker and committeeman. This Parliament attacked, among other things, monopolies, abuses of the Exchequer, and the burdensomeness of commissaries' courts. So acceptably did Bacon proceed in these matters, acceptably to both House and King, that he shortly became James's salaried Counsel Learned in the Law, and was granted a pension. Keen in debate, fertile in resource, respectfully conciliatory toward James, he was at this time and throughout his public career the one outstanding figure who tried to deal generously with King and people, serving both as his moral outlook and political sagacity suggested, in the spirit of a master-servant, for "he had," says Nichol, "as profound a disbelief as Carlyle had in our own age in the collective wisdom of individual ignorances." James soon learned to respect and value such a combination of skilled talent with integrity of purpose, and gave him divers commissions, among them the, preparation of a basis for the proposed union of England and Scotland.

Pending the meeting of the next Parliament, Bacon addressed himself pretty steadily to letters, writing to Henry Saville, Provost of Eton, on "Helps to the Intellectual Powers," and to Chancellor Ellesmere on the importance of making possible the production of an impartial and well-proportioned History of Britain, a task he confessed to be congenial to himself, but of which he was unable to attempt more than the outline. Of much greater value are the

Two Books of the Advancement_of_Learning, published October, 1605, and dedicated to James, a noble though tentative work, containing the elaborated results of Bacon's long inquiry into the means and effects of learning. The First Book proposes to discuss "the excellency of learning and knowledge, and the excellency of the merit and true glory in the augmentation and propagation thereof"; and the Second Book "what the particular acts and works are which have been embraced and undertaken for the advancement of learning." The ground being cleared by the discussions of the First Book, Bacon treats of the means of learning, as schools, books, persons; and then boldly yet patiently attempts "to make a general and faithful perambulation of learning, with an inquiry what parts thereof lie fresh and waste. My purpose is at this time to note only omissions and deficiencies."

In November of the same year Parliament again assembled, and Bacon's ambition for place began again to be stimulated. He applied to Lord Salisbury (Robert Cecil) for the Solicitorship, in March, 1606. As in Elizabeth's reign, however, he was not appointed, but disappointed. Yet his star was waxing. In May he married a well-to-do and comely damsel, Alice Barnham, daughter of an alderman, and, though he appears to have been much more dignified than romantic in this affair, their life together was doubtless not less happy than that of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway. To Spenser's domestic joy