the original. "But," says Campbell, "it is absurd to suppose that James and Buckingham would not cordially have supported him if he could have been successfully defended." 2

"Jaco" and "Steenie"!- those two unworthy mortals whose lives were spent in placing obstacles across the path of English liberty, but which, providentially, gave it the opportunity of accumulating force; how could Campbell have made such a slip as this? A study of the case discloses the reason. He gave undue weight to a note of dissent appended by Buckingham to the judgment of the court. Bacon had said to the King, whose cowardice was proverbial, "Those who strike at your Chancellor will strike at your Crown." He also made a bold demand of Buckingham for release from the Tower, which was granted promptly, for Buckingham was not free from political cowardice, and must have felt the insecurity of his position which later resulted in his assassination. Historical portraits of him are so common that they seem almost as much out of place here as would Velasquez's ubiquitous portrait of Philip IV of Spain; yet it may be proper to give this from Green:

No veil hid the degrading grossness of the Court of James and of Buckingham. . . . The payment of bribes to him, or marriage to his greedy relatives, became the one road to political preferment. Resistance to his will was inevitably followed by dismissal from office. Even the highest and most powerful of the nobles were made to tremble at the note of this young upstart.3

His note of dissent was insincere. The Chancellor was done with, and to assume the rôle of a magnanimous and kindly patron appeared well to his friends. Had Campbell studied his case more carefully he would have refrained from making this careless remark.

Perhaps one of the most noteworthy bits of testimony to

1 The Works, etc., vol. II, pp. 13-40.

2 Lives of the Lord Chancellors, vol. 11, p. 116.

3 Green, Short History, p. 487.

Bacon's beauty of character is furnished by the voluntary confession of Thomas Bushell. The following is an ex

tract:

A Letter to his approved beloved Mr. John Eliot, Esq.

The ample testimony of your true affection towards my Lord Verulam, Viscount St. Albans, hath obliged me your servant. Yet, lest the calumnious tongues of men might extenuate the good opinion you had of his worth and merit, I must ingenuously confess that myself and others of his servants were the occasions of exhaling his vertues into a dark eclipse; which God knowes would have long endured both for the honour of his King and the good of the Commonaltie; had not we whom his bountie nursed, laid on his guiltlesse shoulders our base and execrable deeds to be scand and censured by the whole Senate of a State, where no sooner sentence was given, but most of us forsoke him, which makes us bear the badge of Jewes to this day.1

Bushell's repentance was so sincere that he retired to a desolate island, the Calf of Man, where for three years he led the life of a hermit, sheltered by a hut built with his own hands

FACSIMILE OF THE SEAL OF THOMAS BUSHELL

and subsisting upon herbs, oil, mustard, and honey, “with water sufficient." His lifelong attachment to Bacon, who took him into his service as a youth, "principally" educated him and paid his debts when in financial trouble, is further re1 Rev. A. de la Peyme, Memoirs of Thomas Bushell. 1878.

VICECOMEST

N-ANGLIE

vealed by a large and finely executed gold medal, bearing the head of his benefactor crowned with the familiar hat, with Bushell's name on the obverse.1 The knowledge acquired by assisting Bacon in his scientific experiments led to his connection with the royal mines in Wales, and fortune. Bushell's service to the state finally won for him burial in the cloisters of Westminster Abbey.2

Said Matthew of Bacon:

A friend unalterable to his friends it is not his greatness that I admire, but his virtue.3

And Rawley, his chaplain:

I have been induced to think that if ever there were a beam of knowledge derived from God upon any man in these modern times, it was upon Francis Bacon."

Aubrey and others are equally emphatic in their expressions of his character.

His ability for accomplishing work was astounding. During the four first terms of his office the number of orders and decrees made by him were eight thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight, and the number of suitors whose cases were settled, thirty-five thousand. Nothing like this had been accomplished before.

That Bacon was a sincere Christian cannot reasonably be doubted. The great Puritan movement drew to itself, as all great reforms do, many fanatical and half-crazed men who had suffered by oppression, and were intolerant of all who could not go to the extremes to which they went. Bacon, who was reared in this form of faith, could not adopt many of its narrow views, and was as sincerely friendly with the Catholic Matthew as with the Episcopal Rawley, or the Puritan Cecil.

1 Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, etc., vol. 1, p. 254. London, 1862. The author inappropriately denominates him a medalist.

2 Cf. Dict. Nat. Biog. in loco.

Spedding, Italian Letter, Works, etc., vol. 1, p. 52.

Rawley's Life, p. 47.

None but a clear-sighted and sincere Christian, however, could have made this prayer:

Remember, O Lord! how thy servant has walked before Thee; remember what I have first thought, and what hath been principal in my intentions. I have loved thy assemblys. I have mourned for the diversions of Thy Church. I have delighted in the brightness of Thy Sanctuary. This Vine which Thy right hand hath planted in this nation, I have ever prayed with Thee that it might have the first and the latter rain; and that it might stretch its branches to the seas and to the floods. The state and bread of the poor have been precious in mine eyes; I have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart. I have, though in a despised weed, procured the good of all men.

With respect to the charge that he had forsaken Essex, one made against other friends of the Earl who would not go his length in committing acts savoring of treason, he said:—

Any honest man that hath his heart well planted will forsake his King rather than forsake his God, and forsake his Friend rather than forsake his King; and yet will forsake any earthly commodity, yea, his own life in some cases, rather than forsake his Friend.

In this frame of mind he went back to his books with a joy which finds its echo in "Henry VIII":

Grif. His Overthrow, heap'd Happinesse upon him

For then, and not till then, he felt himselfe,

And found the Blessednesse of being little.

And to adde greater Honors to his Age

Than man could give him; he dy'de fearing God.

IV, 2.

That he was free from the vice of arrogance in an age when it was almost fostered as a virtue, is proved by ample testimony, and also that he was generous to a fault. His sanguine temperament, says Böener, caused him to will to charity so much that his estate failed to satisfy his creditors, and his property was sold at a sacrifice. He was a prophet without honor in his own country, and it was left to future ages to

honor his memory. After the triumph of his enemies, some of whom he saw without any sign of satisfaction come to their well-merited deserts, Bacon labored with restless energy to complete and publish his literary works, realizing that his end was not distant. It was during this period that he printed his "Novum Organum," the "History of Henry VII," "Historia Vitæ et Mortis," and reprinted and enlarged his "Essays."

Bacon's scientific attainments have been criticized by his defamers, who especially quote against him some of the puerilities and misconceptions, especially in medicine and natural history, peculiar to the age in which he lived, and by which he was somewhat influenced. In reading some of these criticisms the caustic saying of Ben Jonson naturally comes to mind: "The writer must lie, and the gentle reader rests happy to have the worthiest works misinterpreted." Such criticisms are unjust, for there was no man living in his day who might not be criticized in the same manner. The vision of Dr. Harvey, whose fame as the discoverer of the circulation of the blood has been blown ad astra, though he was anticipated by Servetus1 in the same degree that Bacon was by Aristotle in the inductive process, was limited in many directions by the boundaries which the schools of his day had fixed. It is the same to-day. The wisest student in science refuses immediate acceptance of a novel discovery until he has had ample time for verification by the most exacting tests. Everybody now knows that a railway from the Atlantic to the Pacific was a feasible project, but when it was proposed some of the best thinkers demurred. One of these declared that it was chimerical; no railway train could possibly pass the Rocky Mountains in winter. When the road was opened he received a free pass for the journey. No human intellect has compassed, or ever will compass, all learning. While Bacon may have been as Hallam declares, "The wisest, greatest of

1 Christianismi Restitutio, in which the circulation of the blood is quite clearly explained.