During Easter, Parliament stood adjourned, and Bacon prepared himself for the dénouement. Of the vindictiveness of the attack he had written thus to Buckingham: "Your Lordship spoke of purgatory. I am now in it; but my mind is in a calm; for my fortune is not my felicity. I know I have clean hands and a clean heart, and I hope a clean house for friends or servants. But Job himself, or whosoever was the justest judge, by such hunting for matters against him, as hath been used against me, may for a time seem foul, especially in a time when greatness is the mark, and accusation is the game. And if this be to be a chancellor, I think if the great seal lay upon Hounslow Heath, nobody would take it up. But the King and your Lordship will I hope put an end to these my straits, one way or other. Bacon here uses "mind" for conscience, or sensibility, for he saw the seriousness of his position, and the tone of the letter reveals troubled thought. He knew himself to be a man innocent in motive whom it would be easy to prove guilty in fact; he knew that James and Buckingham might be tempted to sacrifice him to his and their enemies; and he knew, too, that whatever might be his right of recognition as a just judge and great thinker, "it should be" is too often balked in this world by "here it cannot be. He declared to James: "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." The prayer, too, which he wrote at this time, is a moving one, and concludes significantly: "When I have ascended before men, I have descended in humiliation before thee. so as I may truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage."

...

The Novum Organum, mentioned above, had appeared in October, 1620, and was intended as an instalment, with the earlier Advancement of Learning and the later De Augmentis Scientiarum, of Bacon's review of "all knowledge," his Great Instauration. It is the fruit of twelve years of composition, and though finally published in somewhat unmethodical form, strikes the keynote of the Baconian philosophy, trial by experiment, the submission of theory to natural laws, and the achievement of freedom by harmonious coöperation with those laws.

As the determination of Parliament to push the prosecution, and the reluctance indeed the inability of James and Buckingham decisively to interfere became more and more apparent, Bacon urged the King at least to save him from sentence, and offered to resign the Seal. In vain. Nothing could now prevent his formal trial, not even his withdrawal of all attempt at defence. In Bacon's memorandum of his last conference with James before the House met again, he says: "The law of nature teaches me to speak in my own defence. With respect to

this charge of bribery, I am as innocent as any born upon St. Innocent's Day: I never had bribe or reward in my eye or thought when pronouncing sentence or order. If, however, it is absolutely necessary, the King's will shall be obeyed. I am ready to make an oblation of myself to the King, in whose hands I am as clay, to be made a vessel of honour or dishonour.” The King indicated his desire, hinting strongly that Bacon should submit, and seems to have made him a definite promise concerning future pardon and remission. The "trial" took place, the House of Lords acting as both judge and prosecutor. A formal answer was required to each count in the indictment, and it was then adjudged "that, upon his own confession, they had found him guilty: and therefore that he shall undergo fine and ransom of forty thousand pounds; be imprisoned in the Tower during the King's pleasure; be forever incapable of any office, place, or employment in the State or Commonwealth; and shall never sit in Parliament, nor come within the verge of the Court."

From the Tower, where, of course, his stay was exceedingly brief, the fallen Chancellor wrote to Buckingham: "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 Sir Nicholas Bacon's time." Shortly afterward, his fine was cancelled, and eventually, after miserable delays and

conditions, he was allowed to reënter London, York House first passing into Buckingham's too selfisk hands. A complete pardon Bacon never obtained. He was not permitted to reënter Parliament, and was given scant encouragement by James to pursue even philosophy and letters, though the Court party, and, indeed, his judges at large, knew him to be in himself an upright man, the victim of his own integrity as of others' lack of integrity. Sackville, for example, in conferring with him after the sentence, used this remarkable expression concerning Bacon's unwillingness to give up York House: "If you part not speedily with it, you may defer the good which is approaching near you, and disappointing other aims . . . perhaps anew yield matter of discontent, though you may be indeed as innocent as before."

But five years remained for Bacon, years of unremitting literary toil and philosophic achievement; years, besides, not of brooding over the past but of unconquerable hope for the future. He knew that all debts are at length paid, or, rather, are always being paid. As Emerson - himself a terse essayist on several of Bacon's themes so finely puts it, "the world is full of judgment days. Unfortunately, Bacon did not so fully realize the corresponding truth, that "our own orbit is all our task." That fame is God's thought of a man he felt and believed, yet he allowed himself to become cumbered with much serving, often for lower immediate ends than he

himself would have chosen. His anxiety for the little often obscured or retarded his pursuit of the large. He was too frequently embarrassed with conditions which we could wish he had been spared, for both his character's sake and his work's sake. Yet he was always a progressive man. Too reserved ever to make himself winsome, like Essex; too gentle and discreet to impress himself with coarse positiveness on the official and popular mind, like Coke; a steady and conscientious thinker; a modest and dignified gentleman; an equipped lawyer; a discriminating upholder of the prerogative; a benevolent user of men; and a consistently eager reformer of learning; Bacon presents a composite yet appreciable character.

During his last years he finished his famous History of Henry VII., and began his History of Henry VIII. and his History of Great Britain, neither of which was completed. In 1623 he wrote his History of Life and Death, published the De Augmentis Scientiarum, an enlargement in Latin of the "Advancement," and, probably, the unfinished De Atlantis. In 1625, as before stated, the last edition of the Essays appeared, and the same year found him busily engaged in compiling voluminous records and observations.

The death of James early in the year was soon followed by that of Bacon, Easter Day, April 9, 1626, due to bronchitis contracted while testing the preservative value of snow upon the dead body of a hen. He passed away in a house belonging to the Earl of