The Essays of Francis Bacon

Front matter

THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY

EDITED BY

WILL D. HOWE

Preface

PREFACE.

In this edition of Bacon's Essays, I have used the text of James Spedding, The Works of Francis Bacon, Vol. XII, 1857—1874. Mr. Spedding edited the Essays with the Latin translation before him, and the large majority of his footnotes explain the English text by giving, untranslated, the corresponding Latin translation. In order to simplify the page, all the Latin footnotes have been omitted. Further, I have omitted all of Mr. Spedding's English notes but seventeen, which are distinguished from my own notes by the signature 'S.' The seventeen notes that I have retained bear wholly upon matters of text on which Mr. Spedding is the final authority. For example, in the essay, Of Unity in Religion, I have kept the note calling attention to Bacon's use of the double negative. In the essay, Of Empire, Mr. Spedding's note, from his fellow editor, Mr. Robert Leslie Ellis, is historically interesting, because it shows Bacon following the old physiology. If Bacon had lived two years longer than he did, to hear of Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood, he would undoubtedly have revised his metaphor of "the gate-vein, which disperseth the blood" out of both Essays and The Historie of the Raigne of King Henry the Seventh. Mr. Spedding's note on the essay, Of Nature in Men, tells us that Bacon's use of the verb 'lay' where 'lie' would now be employed may mean that the verbs 'lie' and 'lay' had not become differentiated in his time. All information like this about a classical English author is invaluable to the student, for it encourages accuracy in reading a text and reverence in handling it.

Mr. Spedding translated Bacon's frequent quotations from Latin authors and put his English rendering into the body of the text, in brackets. To make the page clear and pleasing to the eye, I have omitted all the bracketed English translations of Mr. Spedding. My own translations to replace them have been put in the footnotes. In making new translations from the Latin, I have endeavored to bear in mind three things,—to keep near the Latin sense, to use simple idiomatic English, and to catch the Latin spirit, and indeed Bacon's spirit, by being at least brief. It is not possible to read any work of Bacon and know just what he is saying without a reading knowledge of Latin, for he is likely to quote Tacitus or Cicero or Seneca on almost every page. I am of those who deplore the displacement of Latin literature in our schools and colleges by vaguer subjects requiring less mental exertion. I have therefore made no effort either to minimize or to popularize Tacitus and Cicero. They are of the elect. They become more elect, more the aristocrats of letters, as an irrepressible and levelling democracy passes them by on its primrose path to an educational ideal of "small Latin and less Greek." I hope, however, that students of Latin will find my treatment of Bacon's Latin helpful in familiarizing them with the language. With this idea in view, instead of simply locating the Latin quotations, I have frequently given the classical quotation to show the original thought of the Roman author and Bacon's Latin paraphrase of it side by side. In almost every instance I think it will be seen that Bacon while retaining the substance of the thought has expressed it in briefer and simpler Latin. This is partly the difference between a Roman writing his own language when it was living and an Englishman writing it in the age of Elizabeth when it was dead. But it is more than that. It is the piercing intellect of Bacon seeing clear and thinking straight, and shooting its arrow of expression right into the bull's-eye. An example in point is the quotation from Sallust, on the contradictoriness of kings, in the essay, Of Empire. There, making use of the bare thought, Bacon attributes it to Tacitus, but quoting it again in full Latin idiom, in the Advancement of Learning, he ascribes it correctly to Sallust. Bacon is an author who is not afraid to repeat himself, rather he is of opinion that a good idea is worth repeating. I have noted the recurrence of many of the Latin quotations of the Essays in the Advancement of Learning. Dr. William Rawley records that he had a habit of quoting the substance of another man's words, but in better form. Tacitus, in the first book of his Historiae sums up the character of Vespasian as emperor in fourteen words. Bacon quotes the character in the essay, Of Great Place, in six Latin words; in the Advancement of Learning the six words are reduced to five.

In citations from the Bible, Bacon frequently has the Vulgate in mind, quoting it freely just as he quotes Tacitus and Cicero. I have examined all these quotations, and in a number of cases my notes point out variations between the Latin of the Vulgate and Bacon's rendering of it.

In some cases, in order to draw attention to an English word derived directly from a Latin one, I have purposely made a Latinized translation in preference to a more idiomatic one which would have satisfied my own language sense better. One of these premeditated Latinized translations is that from Lucan's Pharsalia in the essay, Of Seditions and Troubles.

Words whose meaning has changed since Bacon's time and obsolete words are defined once only, unless the same word occurs in more senses than one. In defining words, I have followed the authority of the New English Dictionary as far as that work is published, which is at this time, with some breaks, down to the word 'reserve.' Where the Oxford dictionary is not yet available, I have used the Century Dictionary. The words that I have had to define most frequently have been the prepositions 'to,' 'in,' 'of,' 'by,' 'upon,' 'after,' and the like. As one studies the history of these little words, they appear to act the part of sentinels in the expansion of English. Behind them lies the great army of nouns, forever assuming fresh mean to advance into foreign territory, and forever compelling the sentinel prepositions to take up new outposts in order to hold the position gained.

To illustrate Bacon's use of language, I have made a point of drawing upon Shakspere and the Bible. The Authorized Version of the Bible was being translated between the years 1607 and 1610, and was published in 1611. Either The Tempest, composed about 1610 or 1611, or The Winter's Tale, acted May 15, 1611, is Shakspere's last complete play. Bacon brought out the second edition of his Essays, the bulk of them, in 1612. Illustrations from King James's Bible and from Shakspere are the best to be had to explain the English of Bacon's Essays, for the three great classics are almost as precisely contemporaneous as it is possible to be. Making the citations without forethought just as they occurred to me, I found on completing the notes that all the thirty-seven plays of Shakspere had been called into requisition to illustrate Bacon's fifty-eight essays.

"Thy creatures have been my books, but thy Scriptures much more," Bacon wrote in humiliation after his pitiful fall from power. Bacon's knowledge of the Bible, both the Vulgate and the Authorized Version, was thorough and familiar, and he uses it with fine effect, producing that mixture of simplicity and grandeur which marks his style. There is some suggestion of the Bible on almost every page of the Essays. Wherever the Bible is quoted, and wherever there is a reflection of its language or phraseology, I have given in my notes the exact reference, using the Authorized Version which Bacon knew, and the Vulgate, for the Latin allusions.

But while I have made large use of Shakspere and the Bible, my illustrative notes are by no means confined to the seventeenth century. The English language looks backwards as well as forwards, and I have put its literature to use over the centuries from Chaucer to Thomas Hardy. Some of the quotations from Scottish literature indicate the survival in Scots of forms used by Bacon, but now either lost or obsolescent in English.

I have ventured to hope that my notes may serve a double purpose, not only to make Bacon's thought clear, but to rouse interest and to stimulate to further reading. Occasionally they point a pretty moral and are meant to. Sydney Smith's "Maxims to make one get up" is the happiest of renderings for the Latin proverb in Of Parents and Children, while the quotation from The Faery Queene under the word 'indignity,' Of Great Place, gives Spenser's thought on corruption or 'graft.'

I think I took most pleasure in editing the essay, Of Gardens. It is not possible now to know just what iris Bacon meant by the 'chamaïris,' or whether 'flos Africanus' was the botanical name of the French marigold in his day, but as far as I could I have identified botanically all the plants and flowers Bacon mentions in his Elizabethan garden, except those so familiar as to need no comment. And wherever any of them is mentioned by Shakspere I have added a posy from his plays. But Keats and Cowper and Tennyson and Ben Jonson and Thomson and Evelyn and Dryden also walked in Bacon's garden, and last, but not least, Sir Walter Scott was there showing his friend, Susan Edmonstone Ferrier, about.

To insure absolute clearness, all titles of books, both English and Latin, have been cited in full. Abbreviations, especially Latin abbreviations, are more misunderstood and so more disregarded than is generally supposed. Elizabethan titles are given in Elizabethan spelling, and in general in the older literature the older spellings have been preserved.

Finally, the notes explain briefly Bacon's historical allusions. All references, whether to Bacon's reading in writing the Essays, or to my own in editing them, have been personally verified.

Mary Augusta Scott.

Northhampton, Mass.,

Introduction: I. Francis Bacon

INTRODUCTION

I

FRANCIS BACON

Francis Bacon was born January 22, 1561, at York House, in the Strand, London, the youngest of eight children of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. Sir Nicholas Bacon, a stanch Protestant and a good lawyer, was one of that remarkable group of able men the young Queen Elizabeth gathered around her upon her accession to the throne, in 1558. Of her Lord Keeper, William Camden says, "She relied on him as the very oracle of the law."

Sir Nicholas Bacon was twice married; first, to Jane Fernely, daughter of William Fernely, of West Creting, Suffolk, who died leaving three sons and three daughters, and second, to Anne Cooke, second daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, of Gidea Hall, Essex. Lady Anne Cooke Bacon was the mother of Anthony and Francis Bacon. Coming into the world the son of a Lord Keeper, in York House, which he was himself to occupy as Lord Keeper in after years, Francis Bacon was as truly born to commanding position in life as is a king's son. Many of his kinsmen held distinguished positions and filled them with credit to themselves and the nation. Lady Bacon was left a widow as a comparatively young woman, so that we naturally hear more of her family in the history of her famous son, than of his half-brothers and half-sisters, who were considerably older. But what has come down to us of his relations with these elder Bacons helps materially to reconstruct his environment.

The Elizabethans were great builders. The Wars of the Roses ended forever in England the necessity of building for protection from hostile neighbors, and the policy of internal peace fostered by the Tudors enabled Englishmen to accumulate wealth. Landholders under Queen Elizabeth could afford to build beautiful homes, and they liked to surround themselves with the new luxuries brought to their notice in England by the travellers, especially by the travellers in France and Italy. In domestic architecture, two of these luxuries were glass windows, which often fill up the side of a room in an Elizabethan house, and spacious gardens encircling the entire building and adorned with all sorts of devices, some original and some more or less crudely adapted from formal gardens abroad. Sir Nicholas Bacon, though not a rich man, built two houses. Redgrave, Guilford, Suffolk, where he had married his first wife, was without gardens, and so limited in size that Queen Elizabeth visiting her Lord Keeper there told him his house was too small. "No, Madam," replied Sir Nicholas, "my house is not too small for me, but your Majesty has made me too great for my house." Gorhambury, near St. Albans, was a larger house. About Gorhambury, says Edmund Lodge, in his Portrait of Sir Nicholas Bacon, he added "gardens of great extent, in the contrivance and decoration of which every feature of the bad taste of his time was abundantly lavished." Gorhambury was left to Lady Anne Bacon, and ultimately became the property and the country home of Francis Bacon.

The mansion of Redgrave was inherited by Sir Nicholas Bacon, 2d, who was doubtless hard pressed to support there his family of nine sons and three daughters. Nathaniel Bacon, second of the elder sons, is described as of Stiffkey, Norfolk. He was something of an artist. Playing upon the name and domestic habits of his stepmother, Anne Cooke Bacon, he made a portrait of her, now at Gorhambury, dressed as a cook and standing in a litter of dead game. The third elder brother, Edward Bacon, obtained from Queen Elizabeth, in 1574, a lease of Twickenham Park, on the Thames fronting the royal palace at Richmond. Francis Bacon's letters as a young man are often dated from Twickenham Park, showing that he lived from time to time at his half-brother's country seat.

In 1597, when Bacon was elected to Parliament for Ipswich, the family county town, he had as colleagues no less than six kinsmen. His brother Anthony sat for Oxford; his half-brother, Nathaniel, for Lynn; his cousin, Sir Edward Hoby, for Rochester; his cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, for Herts; while Henry Neville, who represented Liskeard, was his nephew, the son of his half-sister, Elizabeth Bacon, whose second husband was Sir Henry Neville. Another connection of Bacon's in the Parliament of 1597 and his colleague in the representation for Ipswich was Michael Stanhope, grand-nephew to his mother.

Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, a remarkable woman, was a member of a remarkable family. Her father, Sir Anthony Cooke, tutor to King Edward VI, had five daughters, who received the same careful, thorough education that he gave to his sons. They all became highly educated women and all five made brilliant and happy marriages. Mildred, the eldest, became the second wife of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the great Lord Treasurer who guided Elizabeth's government so adroitly and so wisely. Elizabeth Cooke, the third daughter, married twice; first, Sir Thomas Hoby, ambassador to France and translator of Il Cortegiano (The Courtier), which Dr. Johnson described as "the best book that ever was written on good breeding," and, second, John, Lord Russell, son of Francis Russell, second Earl of Bedford; Catherine Cooke married Sir Henry Killigrew, of that family of Killigrews of Cornwall which in the time of the Restoration produced the two dramatists, father and son, Thomas Killigrew senior and junior; Margaret Cooke married Sir Ralph Rowlett.

Anne Cooke Bacon is said to have been able to read Latin, Greek, Italian, and French, "as her native tongue." There remain two translations by her, both showing her interest in the Protestant cause. Before her marriage she translated Certayne Sermons of the ryghte famous and excellente clerk Master B. Ochine (1550?). This is a collection of sermons by the Italian Protestant preacher, Bernardino Ochino, who was a prebend of Canterbury under Archbishop Cranmer. Fourteen of the twenty translated sermons are the work of Anne Cooke. The most interesting literary work of Bacon's mother is a translation from the Latin of Bishop Jewel's Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1562, entitled Apologie or aunswer in defence of the Church of England, 1562 and 1564. The second edition contains a prefatory address to Lady Bacon as the translator, by Archbishop Parker. It seems that she had submitted the MS. to him, accompanied by a letter written in Greek, and he returned it to her printed. An Elizabethan Protestant treatise says,—"The apologie of this Church was written in Latin, & translated into English by A. B. (Anne Bacon) with the comendation of M. C. (Mildred Cecil), which twaine were sisters, & wives unto Cecil and Bacon, and gave their assistance and helping hands in the plot and fortification of this newe erected synagog." Queen Elizabeth thought so highly of the Apologie that she ordered a copy of it to be chained in every parish church in England. Many of Lady Bacon's letters to her sons Anthony and Francis are extant. They are written in vigorous English interspersed with quotations from Greek and Latin writers, and the picture of family relations they reveal is highly interesting.

These details show how exceptional were the cir surrounding Bacon by right of birth. He was brought up in the society of the greatest personages in England and was known to the Queen as a child. Dr. William Rawley, his chaplain and first biographer, tells the story of Elizabeth's attraction towards the bright boy. The Queen "delighted much then to confer with him, and to prove him with questions; unto whom he delivered himself with that gravity and maturity above his years, that Her Majesty would often term him, The Young Lord-Keeper. Being asked by the Queen how old he was, he answered with much discretion, being then but a boy, That he was two years younger than Her Majesty's happy reign; with which answer the Queen was much taken." This anecdote, furnishing the only glimpse of Francis Bacon as a child, is as picturesque as it is authentic.

In April, 1573, Francis and Anthony Bacon, boys of twelve and fourteen, respectively, were entered as fellow-commoners of Trinity College, Cambridge, under the care of John Whitgift, then Master of Trinity and Vice-Chancellor of the University, and afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. Whitgift's account-book tells us incidentally what was the general course of study at Trinity College in Bacon's boyhood. It shows that between April, 1573, and Christmas, 1575, he supplied the Bacon boys with the following books,—Caesar, Cicero, Livy, Sallust, Xenophon, Homer's Iliad, Hermogenes, Demosthenes's Olynthiacs, Aristotle, and Plato. We do not know how these authors were studied, but it is certain that Francis Bacon left Cambridge in his six year with a good knowledge of the Greek and Latin classics and a love of reading. There are those who doubt whether any system of education can produce a better result than that. Bacon was "drenched" in classicism, to use one of his own telling words. In after years when he sat down in his study to marshal his thoughts on any subject he recalled as if by instinct the wisdom of the ancients. He could command as easily the judgments of the great Greek and Roman historians as the imagination of the great Greek and Roman poets. Tacitus sums up for him in immortal phrase a contemporary character, and Homer and Vergil guide his expression in the vivid imagery that embroiders and illumines his language, like old carving in wood or stone, or the rich binding of a rare and princely book.

Besides Whitgift's accounts, two anecdotes of Bacon's undergraduate days survive, both as characteristic of the future philosopher as the story of the young Lord Keeper is of the future courtier. One is a reminiscence of his own recorded in Sylva Sylvarum, (Century II. 151),—

"I remember in Trinity College in Cambridge, there was an upper chamber, which being thought weak in the roof of it, was supported by a pillar of iron of the bigness of one's arm, in the midst of the chamber; which if you had struck, it would make a little flat noise in the room where it was struck, but it would make a great bomb in the chamber beneath." Dr. Rawley relates the other story,—"Whilst he was commorant [a resident] in the Uni , about sixteen years of age, (as his lordship hath been pleased to impart unto myself), he first fell into the dislike of the philosophy of Aristotle; not for the worthlessness of the author, to whom he would ever ascribe all high attributes, but for the unfruitfulness of the way; being a philosophy (as his lordship used to say) only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man; in which mind he continued to his dying day."

This early interest in the physics of sound, a subject which always attracted Bacon, is as significant as the youthful judgment on the unfruitfulness of the philosophy of Aristotle. The judgment makes the distinction between philosophy embracing all knowledge, as the ancients understood it and as indeed it does, and science, for which Bacon's term "natural history" is now old-fashioned. With Bacon, essentially a literary man, science was to lose its moorings to letters.

At the end of three years Bacon left Cambridge, and at the age of about sixteen and a half years, was entered into the Society of the "Ancients" of Gray's Inn. Almost immediately after he had begun the study of law, an opportunity offered for him to travel and see the world. Sir Amias Paulet, who was sent to France as the Queen's ambassador, in 1576, invited Francis Bacon to go with him as a member of his household. Dr. Rawley says, "He was after awhile held fit to be entrusted with some message or advertisement to the Queen; which having performed with great approbation, he returned back into France again, with intention to continue for some years there." He remained about two years, spending most of the time in Paris, but following the French Court to Blois, Tours, and Poictiers. Henry III, of Valois, was the French King and Catharine de' Medici the queen mother. The wars and intrigues of the Holy League were going on and the events stirring which led to the assassination of Henry III. The essays, Of Revenge, Of Custom and Education, and Of Prophecies, allude to the political and social influences that surrounded the young attaché of the English ambassador. In Prophecies, "one Dr. Pena" tells the inquiring lad a story about an astrologer and "the queen mother, who was given to curious arts." Another personal allusion to his stay in France occurs in the sixth book of the De Augmentis Scientiarum where he describes a biliteral cipher he invented in the intervals of his diplomatic leisure in Paris. Writing in cipher was a curious art then widely practised, and Bacon's early interest in it reveals the natural turn of his mind for the observation of signs, that is, facts, and their recombination into new relations. Distinctly scientific is the observation of an echo at Pont-Charenton, near Paris, which the young diplomat investigated and reports in Sylva Sylvarum (Century III. 249, 251). "And thereby I did hap to find that an echo would not return S, being but a hissing and an interior sound." The description was written many years later, but the boy's experiment had remained perfectly clear and fresh. He says he heard the echo "return the voice thirteen several times," and describes it as "a tossing of the voice, as a ball, to and fro; like to reflections in looking-glasses." Further on the Sylva Sylvarum (Century X. 986) gives a biographical note concerning the event which changed the whole course of Francis Bacon's life. Writing on what he calls "the secret virtue of sympathy and antipathy," now named telepathy, Bacon says,—

"I myself remember, that being in Paris, and my father dying in London, two or three days before my father's death I had a dream, which I told to divers English gentlemen, that my father's house in the country was plastered all over with black mortar."

Sir Nicholas Bacon died February 20, 1579. Dr. Rawley's statement of the situation in which Francis Bacon was left by his father's sudden death is,— "In his absence in France his father the lord-keeper died, having collected (as I have heard of knowing persons) a considerable sum of money, which he had separated, with intention to have made a competent purchase of land for the livelihood of this his youngest son (who was only unprovided for; and though he was the youngest in years, yet he was not the lowest in his father's affection); but the said purchase being unaccomplished at his father's death, there came no greater share to him than his single part and portion of the money dividable amongst five brethren; by which means he lived in some straits and necessities in his younger years." Anthony Bacon had been estab at Redburn, Herts, near St. Albans, and the manor of Gorhambury went to him as the elder son, although Lady Bacon lived there until her death. Francis Bacon's legacy was a good name and a great intellect, which had been trained and cultivated by the best education to be had at that time. Diplomacy could not be pursued as a career without means, and a month after his father's death, Bacon returned to London. He was eighteen years old, and was dependent on his own exertions both for a living and for advancement in the public service. He took lodgings in Gray's Inn and resolutely applied himself to the study of the law. Later Anthony Bacon, back from some years of travel in France, Italy, and Spain, joined him, and the brothers, with little ready money between them, set up a coach, much to their frugal mother's dismay. She sends to her sons from Gorhambury home-brewed beer, fish, strawberries in season, and game, with accompanying letters full of motherly care and admonition. A letter to Anthony, dated, "Gorhambury, April 1, 1595," begins,—

"I send between your brother and you the first flight of my dove-house; the Lord be thanked for all: ii dozen and iiii pigeons, xii to you, and xvi to your brother, because he was wont to love them better than you from a boy." Another letter to Anthony tells us what Bacon's habits as a student were, "I verily think your brother's weak stomach to digest hath been much caused and confirmed by untimely going to bed, and then musing nescio quid when he should sleep, and then, in consequence, by late rising and long lying in bed, whereby his men are made slothful and himself continueth sickly." Gorhambury, 24 May, 1592.)

It may be that Francis Bacon burned the midnight oil, for he worked hard at his profession and he rose rapidly into notice. In 1584, at the age of twenty-three, he was elected to Parliament for Melcombe Regis; in 1586, he sat for Taunton. The "great year" '88, the year of the Armada, made him member for Liverpool and Reader at Gray's Inn. In all Bacon was elected to the House of Commons eight times and his Parliamentary career covered the thirty years between 1584 and 1614. As a member of the Lower House Bacon combined qualities very seldom found in the same person. He was a useful and able committee-man, a ready writer, and a good speaker. With rare good fortune there has come down to us the impression he made as a public speaker on his two great contemporaries, Sir Walter Ralegh and Ben Jonson. Dr. Rawley says,—"I will only set down what I heard Sir Walter Ralegh once speak of him by way of comparison (whose judgment may well be trusted), That the Earl of Salisbury [his cousin, Robert Cecil] was an excellent speaker, but no good penman; that the Earl of Northampton (the Lord Henry Howard) was an excellent penman, but no good speaker; but that Sir Francis Bacon was eminent in both." Ben Jonson's testimony to Bacon's eloquence is itself nobly eloquent: In Timber; or Discoveries made upon Men and Matter (Dominus Verulamius), he writes,—"Yet there hapn'd, in my time, one noble Speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language, (where hee could spare, or passe by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man spake more neatly, more presly, more weightily, or suffer'd lesse emptinesse, lesse idlenesse, in what hee utter'd. No member of his speech but consisted of the owne graces. His hearers could not cough, or looke aside from him, without losse. Hee commanded where hee spoke, and had his Judges angry, and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affection more in his power. The feare of every man that heard him, was, lest hee should make an end."

That Bacon was not naturally a good speaker, but studiously labored to acquire a pleasing address, is clear from a note in a paper of counsels and rules drawn up for the guidance of his own conduct, and called in his ready Latin—Custumae aptae ad Individuum, 'Fit Habits for the Individual,' that individual being Francis Bacon,—"To suppress at once my speaking, with panting and labour of breath and voice. Not to fall upon the main too sudden, but to induce and intermingle speech of good fashion."

The House of Commons was Bacon's school of life. It was there that he acquired his vast knowledge of men and affairs. He began almost at once the excellent practice of recording his experiences, summing up for himself his thoughts on the various matters of business that came before Parliament. The earliest of these state papers, with characteristic boldness, is a Letter of Advice to Queen Elizabeth, written at the close of 1584 or the beginning of 1585, on the difficult question of her policy towards the Roman Catholic interest. It is a remarkable paper to be produced by a young man of twenty-four. Though Protestant in tone the Letter is yet neither Puritan nor partisan in character. It is a broad, calm, judicial statement of what Bacon considered to be the position of the English Church three years before the Armada. In this paper and in another on the same subject four years later, An Advertisement touching the Controversies of the Church of England (1589), which is the essay Of Unity in Religion in germ, we see the future Lord Chancellor. The philosopher had already written the first sketch of his ideas on the new learning, calling it with the simple grandiloquence of youth, Temporis Partus Maximus, the 'Greatest Birth of Time.' It is certain that Bacon hoped to win advancement at Court by means of his state papers. It is equally certain that the Lord Treasurer Burghley did not appreciate the work of his nephew. He was indeed employed to prepare papers from time to time, but no preferment came. Burghley was a plain, practical man, immersed in complicated affairs of state. It is possible, as has been suggested, that he quietly opposed the advancement of Francis Bacon in order to keep the pathway open for his son, Robert Cecil, a man of moderate ability only. It may be, Machiavellian as he was, that he recognized from the first the pliability of his nephew and declined to trust him with political business. Without a doubt, Bacon's literary and philosophical aims were to him but the visions of a youthful enthusiast. After years of hope deferred, at an age which he describes as "somewhat ancient, one and thirty years," Bacon wrote the famous letter to Lord Burghley, setting forth his claims with dignity and appealing for help in the furtherance of his ambition,— "My Lord,—With as much confidence as mine own honest and faithful devotion unto your service and your honourable correspondence unto me and my poor estate can breed in a man, do I commend myself unto your Lordship. I wax now somewhat ancient: one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in 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 bare in 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. Besides I do not find in myself so much self-love, but that the greater parts of my thoughts are to deserve well (if I be able) of my friends, and namely of your Lordship; who, being the Atlas of this commonwealth, the honour of my house, and the second founder of my poor estate, I am tied by all duties, both of a good patriot, and of an unworthy kinsman, and of an obliged servant, to employ whatsoever I am to do you service. 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 have 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, hath 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 vainglory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropia. is so fixed in my mind as it cannot be removed. And I do easily see, that place of any reasonable countenance doth bring commandment of more wits than a man's own; which is the thing I greatly affect. And for your Lordship, perhaps you shall not find more strength and less encounter in any other. And if your Lordship shall find now, or at any time, that I do seek or affect any place whereunto any that is nearer unto your Lordship shall be concurrent, say then that I am a most dishonest man. And if your Lordship will not carry me on, I will not do as Anaxagoras did, who reduced himself with contemplation unto voluntary poverty, but this I will do—I will sell the inheritance 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 become some sorry book-maker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth which (he said) lay so deep. This which I have writ unto your Lordship is rather thoughts than words, being set down without all art, disguising, or reservation. Wherein I have done honour both to your Lordship's wisdom, in judging that that will be best believed of your Lordship which is truest, and to your Lordship's good nature, in retaining no thing from you. And even so I wish your Lordship all happiness, and to myself means and occasions to be added to my faithful desire to do you service. From my lodgings at Gray's Inn." (1592.)