riches at least as plentifully, we may be well assured, had it not been bound and weighed down by these entanglements. As it was, he was obliged to select a field of exertion, in which he might be the worker of his own fortunes. He chose the law, his father's profession, and that also in which it seemed probable that his court connections would prove most available in assisting his rise. Having entered himself, accordingly, of Gray's inn, he sat down for some years to a life of sedulous study; but, determined, as it would seem, not to divorce himself from his old pursuits, to which his disposition most naturally inclined him, while cultivating that new learning by which he was to win his bread, his hours of application were divided between law and philosophy.

There is evidence that while thus employed, he had not only completed the idea of his inductive system in his own mind, but had sketched at least its general outline in a little work which he called Temporis Partus Maximus, The Greatest Birth of Time. He was far however from neglecting his legal studies-and when he was in due course called to the bar, his knowledge and talents soon procured him a respectable practice. In 1588, he discharged with applause the office of reader of his inn; and immediately after he was appointed by the queen her counsel learned in the law extraordinary-an honour for which he was probably indebted to the good offices of his powerful relation, Lord Burleigh. But, as throughout the whole of Bacon's legal and political career, there is much that is unsatisfactory to the admirers of his genius, and much also that is not to be very easily explained upon any hypothesis of his character and motives that may be proposed, so the course which he took at its very commencement is far from being the most intelligible part of it. Nearly connected as he was with the Cecils, he chose to attach himself to the party of their great opponent, the earl of Essex; and there is too much reason to believe from his subsequent conduct, that he was induced to form this alliance not so much from any distinterested admiration of the high qualities of that able and generous but unfortunate nobleman, as with the view of thereby the more effectually promoting his own advancement. He seems to have calculated that he would secure for himself a double chance of favour by thus having hold, as it were, of the leaders of both the rival parties that divided the court. As generally happens however with such over-refined schemes of policy, this project of Bacon's, if he did entertain it, seems to have failed. Essex, zealously as he endeavoured to further the interests of his new partizan, was never able to procure him any thing from the ministry or his sovereign; nay, his patronage, as might indeed be supposed, proved actually injurious to its object. His relations, the Cecils, had bestowed upon him the reversion of the office of register of the star-chamber; upon the enjoyment of the income of which, however, he did not enter till twenty years afterwards. He used to say that "it was like another man's ground buttalling upon his house, which might mend his prospect, but did not fill his barn." In 1594, he first appeared decidedly as a candidate for political honours, by making application for the office of solicitor-general. On this occasion he pursued his suit with extraordinary earnestness, and called to his aid all the influence of his friends. Essex in particular exerted himself in his behalf with his characteristic ardour. All

however was in vain; the place was given to another; but so strongly did Essex feel that his advocacy, instead of assisting, had in fact hurt the cause of his friend, that he insisted upon remedying the mischief which he conceived had resulted from his interference by making over to Bacon a piece of land, which the latter afterwards sold for £1800. "I know," said he, in bestowing upon him this gift, "you are the least part of your own matter, but you fare ill, because you have chosen me for your mean and dependance." It is melancholy to have to relate how Bacon requited this generosity. A few years after this time, (namely in 1601) Essex, as is well known, was brought to the block. Without attempting to extenuate the legal guilt, and certainly without denying the extreme imprudence and rashness of the misguided nobleman, we shall not be thought to speak of him with undue charity, when we say that at least he did not deserve that Bacon should be found among those who assisted in bringing him to a bloody death. Yet so it was; his former friend, whose fortunes he had done every thing in his power to advance, and who had shared in his profuse liberality, not only appeared as the crown lawyer to plead against him on his trial, and to urge his condemnation, but after his execution, when the law, it might have been thought, had had its full revenge upon its victim, was persuaded to lend the aid of his eloquent pen, to blazon forth the treasons of his ancient benefactor, and to employ all the arts of the skilful advocate to hand down his name with infamy to posterity. This conduct, as it well deserved, brought down upon Bacon a storm of public odium, which long continued to pursue him. Many years afterwards, he attempted in a letter addressed to the earl of Devonshire, to vindicate the motives from which he had acted, on the pretence that his duty to his sovereign who had commanded his services, was a higher obligation than that by which he was bound to his friend; but it can hardly be supposed that he did much to set himself' right in public estimation by so paltry an apology. The atrocity of an act of ingratitude so revolting to the natural feelings of man was not to be quibbled away. Bacon, however, it is worth remarking, seems to have entertained, or at least to have professed, both upon this and upon other subjects, what perhaps we may call a more subtle morality than that commonly received. There can be little doubt, indeed, we think, that he sometimes suffered himself to be imposed upon by the sophistries of his very ingenious and refining intellect, in regard to points of principle as to which a man of plainer judgment would not have been so likely to go astray. Some parts of his future political conduct furnish still more striking evidence of this. Meanwhile, however, he was far from giving up" what was meant for mankind," wholly to the struggles of political ambition.

About the year 1596, he had completed his 'Maxims of the law,' forming the first part of his treatise, entitled The Elements of the Common Law of England,' which however was not printed till after his death. In 1597, appeared the first part of his celebrated Essays, or Counsels'- -a work which has been since reprinted innumerable times, and continues to hold its place as one of the most favourite popular manuals of instruction and entertainment in the language. These essays-which were much altered and enlarged in subsequent impressions were flatteringly received by the public from the first,

and were always esteemed by the author himself as among the happiest of his performances. In 1598, he composed a 'History of the Alienation Office,' which is held to be in the highest degree creditable to his legal learning, but which remained in manuscript till published in Mallet's edition of his collected works about the middle of last century. In 1600, he was elected to the office of double reader by the society of Gray's inn, the duties of which he discharged with great applause. Having soon after this, also, made his amende honorable to the dominant party in the court by his more than abandonment, as just related, of his early patron Essex, we find him pursuing the new path upon which he had entered with a manifest determination to make the most of the advantages he had received. In the house of commons—of which he had been for some years a member, having been first chosen to represent the county of Middlesex in 1592—he distinguished himself as an able and eloquent debater on the side of the crown. During the short remainder of the queen's life, however, he remained without any ther preferment, but immediately on her death, he hastened to pay his court to the new sovereign, into whose favour he sought to ingratiate himself by every means which it was in his power to employ. He seems to have considered that he had now arrived at a crisis in the progress of his life, which called upon him to bring up all his resources to the occasion if he would play the game of his ambition with success. Nor were the pains he took without the expected effect.

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On the arrival of James in London, (in July 1603) Bacon was introduced to him at Whitehall, and received the honour of knighthood. The following year he was named king's counsel, with a fee of forty pounds a year: another pension of £60 being granted him at the same time, for special services performed by himself and his brother Anthony Bacon. This appointment, and the known favour in which he stood with his sovereign, no doubt materially advanced his professional reputation and gains; and he soon after still farther augmented his fortune by marrying a rich city-heiress, Alice, the daughter of Benedict Barnham Esq. alderman. In 1607, he at last by renewed solicitation obtained the object for which he had applied thirteen years before, and was made solicitor-general. From this time, his importance both in Westminster-hall and in the house of commons greatly increased; and he was entitled to consider himself in the direct way to the highest honours which the crown could bestow. This prosperity, however, brought its annoyances and vexations as well as its golden visions along with it. His shining talents and growing influence exposed him in particular to the jealousy of his celebrated rival in the race of court-favour and professional distinction, Sir Edward Coke, who, quite as ambitious and unscrupulous as Bacon, was besides almost necessarily thrown by the cha racter both of his acquirements and of his temper into a position, as it were, of antipathy and conflict with reference to his calm and philosophic contemporary. A great lawyer, as he most unquestionably was, and well knew himself to be, Coke naturally felt indignant that a man like Bacon, of very inferior attainments in the learning of their common profession, should yet be not only so far favoured as to be allowed to tread close upon his heels in the road of advancement, but should even be deemed to have some claim and some chance to step before him, or to mount to a station of more dignity and splendour than he himself

could count upon achieving. Being a great lawyer merely, Coke was utterly unfitted to comprehend the noble intellectual endowments of Bacon, and probably regarded both his philosophy and his eloquence with contempt, after the manner in which arrogant ignorance is accustomed to despise whatever it does not understand. Bacon, on the other hand, with less fierceness of hostility, was not perhaps very likely to take a more lofty measure of the pretensions by which he was opposed -and possibly did not perceive any thing so very love-inspiring in a mere walking dictionary of decisions as to terrify him to fall down and worship it as either god or oracle. These considerations sufficiently account for the repugnance and occasionally active hostility which divided the two luminaries so long as they continued to move in each other's neighbourhood. Neither the irritation, however, of these quarrels and mutual jealousies, nor the weight of his various public duties withdrew the mind of Bacon from its higher and proper sphere. In 1605, he came forward as the unfolder of a new method of philosophy by the publication of his noble treatise on the advancement of learning, the first part of his great work which he entitled the Instauratio Magna or Instauration of the sciences. The continuation of this undertaking appears to have formed the business of his more serious studies during many of the succeeding years of his life. In 1610, appeared his ingenious treatise on the Wisdom of the Ancients, in which he endeavours, certainly with great felicity of fancy, if not always with demonstrative effect, to penetrate what he conceived to be the hidden meaning of the mythology of antiquity. The next preferment which he obtained was the office of judge of the court of Marshalsea, conjointly with the then knight-marshal, Sir Thomas Vavasour. Reckoning his wife's fortune, an estate which he possessed in Hertfortshire, and another which had belonged to his father, and which he had now inherited by the death of his elder brother Anthony, together with his place of register to the court of star-chamber, of which he had, after waiting long, at length come to the enjoyment, and his professional emoluments, it is conjectured that his income at this time could not be less than five thousand pounds. In 1613, by dint of persevering application in person to the king, and after having been already once disappointed of his object by the unexpected recovery from a dangerous illness of the individual whom he hoped to succeed, he obtained the office of attorney-general; and thereby no doubt still farther improved his revenues. Indeed we find him a few years after this declaring that the attorney-generalship alone was worth to him full six thousand a year. In this office it is not to be concealed that Bacon showed himself as subservient a doer of all work as the crown could have desired, supporting the prerogative with his best zeal and ability in all its arbitrary exactions, and encroachments on the liberty of the subject. It was about the era of Bacon's appointment as attorney-general, that the fall of James's first minion, the infamous Somerset, made way for the introduction and rapid rise at court of his successor George Villiers, afterwards created duke of Buckingham. Bacon seized the opportunity of fortifying the position he had gained by forming an intimate association with the new favourite, who is considered indeed to have been in no small degree indebted to the sagacious attorney-general for the counsels by which he hastened his elevation, and maintained and ex

tended his ascendancy over the mind of his royal master. There is extant among Bacon's works an elaborate discourse addressed to Villiers for his guidance, and which bears to have been compiled at the favourite's request on entering upon his delicate office. The connection between the two parties subsisted during the life of Bacon, whose subsequent rise there can be little doubt it materially facilitated. In 1616, the attorney-general was sworn a member of the privy council— and he seems at this time to have been also chancellor to the prince.

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The grand object of his ambition, however, now seemed to be coming within his grasp, and the opportunity to be presented, if he could but command the requisite dexterity of striking at the prize and making it his own. The aged Lord-Chancellor Egerton, was attacked by an illness from which he was not expected to recover. Bacon immediately exerted every engine within his reach in order to persuade the king to bestow upon him the seals, in case of the expected vacancy. At his instigation, the favourite in particular plied the roval ear with whatever arguments or solicitations were most likely to produce the desired effect. The eager candidate even addressed his majesty himself in an earnest petition for the coveted dignity, in which he set forth his qualifications in terms so anxious that they deserve to be quoted as a sample of the manner in which these negociations, which now seem so strange, were wont to be managed. "Now I beseech your majesty," says he, "let me put you the present case truly. If you Lord Coke, this will follow, first, your majesty shall put an over-ruling nature into an over-ruling place, which may breed an extreme; next, you shall blunt his industry in matter of finances, which seemeth to aim at another place; and, lastly, popular men are no sure mounters for your majesty's saddle. If you take my Lord Hobart," (the chief-justice of the common pleas) "you shall have a judge at the upper end of your council board, and another at the lower end, whereby your majesty will find your prerogative pent; for though there should be emulation between them, yet, as Legisto, they will agree in magnifying that wherein they are best. *** For myself, I can only present your majesty with gloria in obsequio, yet I dare promise, that, if I sit in that place, your business shall not make such short turns upon you as it doth; but when a direction is once given, it shall be pursued and performed; and your majesty shall only be troubled with the true care of a king, which is, to think what you would have done in chief, and not how for the passages. I do presume also, in respect of my father's memory, and that I have been always gracious in the lower house; have interest in the gentry of England, and shall be able to do some good effect in rectifying that body of parliament-men which is cardo rerum; for let me tell your majesty, that that part of the chancellor's place, which is to judge in equity between party and party, that same regnum judiciale, (which, since my father's time, is but too much enlarged), concerneth your majesty least, more than the acquitting of your conscience for justice; but it is the other parts of a moderator amongst your counsel, of an overseer over your judges, of a planter of fit justices and governors in the country, that importeth your affairs and these times most. I will add, also, that I hope by my care the inventive part of your council will be strengthened, who now commonly do exercise rather their judgments than their inventions, and the inventive part cometh

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