is satisfied with a mere photograph of himself—what is called an untouched picture. His friends see its truth. He cannot; there is something wanting. Yet is it no less exact if inevitably severe.

Contrast the ideal and painted semblances of men with these products of nature-these inexorable facts. How poor does the reality seem! This is an image in point. The facts of Bacon's life live. In their nakedness they supply a harsh and severe picture. They are true. Not the whole truth; but still much better than a merely imaginary product.

Having alluded to an alleged conspiracy to overthrow Bacon, it remains only to notice one of its asserted conditions-that it was a fraud, to overthrow St. Albans and place Williams. This may be declared a happy invention, founded in part on a scandalous hypothesis. The seal was vacant from April to July. Bacon's system had deprived the crown of good lawyers, of able judges. Bacon wanted tools, not justices, and when he lost the seals, there was no sufficient or fit man to take the place; neither Yelverton, nor Hobart, nor Coventry, nor Montagu were adequate. There was at the time, however, a very able churchman, admitted to be a man of capable business faculty, of undoubted application, of unwearying assiduity, fully adapted for the post. James leaned to the civil law, he preferred the church to the law, because the ecclesiastics and priests had always been foremost in their race of servility. They had at all times been ready to declare him God's vicegerent on earth. They paid him honours as a divinity. Dr. Cowel had exalted his prerogative beyond all stretch, and out-Heroded Herod, in his notions

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BACON'S SUCCESSOR.

of royal power and dignity. Therefore a churchman was in unison with the King's views; but the matter remained for a long time undecided. It is, however, manifestly certain that if Williams had been the destined heir, he would have been placed at once, and a post so important would not have been held open so long.

It would appear singular that the strife to introduce an antique standard in law existed, as in the arts and in architecture; yet so it was. Attempts had been made to assimilate English to Roman law from the time of the Conquest. Some of our early lawyers, the great Chief Justice Fortescue among the number, were violently opposed to such a course. Bacon inclined, however, to this feeling. Some quotations from his advice in the choice of privy councillors might have been adduced in proof.

Williams was, if Hacket is reliable, a noble man in private life. "He was far more ready to give than take, to oblige than be beholding. Magis illud laborare ut illi quamplurimi debeant, as Sallust remarked of Jugurtha," is his Biographer's testimony. The King had always been inclined to the canon law. He preferred a churchman. Williams was indefatigable, pliant, and zealous. Villiers was under personal obligations to him in the matter of his courtship and marriage. And as to the base slanders insinuated, it is only fit to say that they are but slanders, to which facts at once give the lie. Williams attacked the Countess for changing her religion in the December of the year following; and she had then been in the hands of Fisher the Jesuit for many months. His dismissal arose from his superior virtue. He was not as

BACON'S FAILURE AND SUCCESS, SIMILAR IN SOURCE. 507

compliant as Bacon. He was very servile; but not servile enough. At the end of Trinity Term, viz., in May, 1624, he refused to seal a patent from Charles to Lord Conway. This roused that susceptible monarch's ire. At the beginning of next term he was apprised that the King would have him dismissed. On the 25th of October he delivered

up the seals.

No man, equal in meanness to the great philosopher, could be found to succeed him. His post, therefore, frequently changed hands after his fall. Living in an evil age, he was equal to its worst requirements. He flourished for a long time, but retribution long delayed came full surely. Had he considered that

"Heaven doth with us, as we with torches do,
Not light them for ourselves,"

much of his career, and its attendant humiliations, might have been averted-some of his fame, but all his dishonour. He had presumed to wear an undeserved dignity." Had attempted to "cozen fortune," and seem honourable without the stamp of merit, and thus had tempted that doom and disgrace which it would be idle to declare he did not fully deserve.

508

THE FALL.

CHAPTER XXIII.

RALEIGH ends his story of the 'History of the World' with the moral that all the "far-stretched greatness of man" is covered in by the words hie jacet. The contemplation of a vast army, of which not one man would presently remain, is said to have conveyed the same pang of grief to Xerxes. Shakspere, in those pathetic lines from 'The Tempest,' implying that all the products of man's restless ambition shall fade away like "the baseless fabric of a vision," conveys more fully, perfectly, and nobly the same truth.

In the fall of Wolsey the great poet has indicated the pathos and personal suffering supplied in the fate which has now fallen on Bacon, of surviving the death of his proudest hopes. Henceforth, like Napoleon the Great, he is to suffer the fate of Prometheus. He is to be chained to a rock, with anger and cruel indignation preying on his heart. To suffer the worst fate which the fable of old time, or the history of the new presents. But he is not stricken down. He does not, like Napoleon, vent his spleen on those unhappy enough to be about him. He bears with him an amulet against the worst

malice of fortune-a "mind not to be changed by time or place;" which is its own vast empire. He has within him a philosophy which defies fate.

Has he not moralized too, with Epictetus, "Heri vidi fragilem frangi, hodie vidi mortalem mori ?"* "That if a man's mind be deeply seasoned with the consideration of the mortality and corruptible nature of things," he will perceive the nothingness of all; and with this philosophy he falls back on his early studies.

We, who have watched him ascend-who have seen with what care and diligence, with what assiduous labour and patience, he has wrought out his splendid careerhave become partners in his fate. We must surely sympathise with the great man fallen, with the proud soul humbled. We have traced him from earth, watched him in his daring flight, borne up on unbated wing, till he became a mere speck, threading his precipitous pathway up through heaven; saw the flash of the bolt that struck him in mid career, and tumbled him headlong to earth. His fall has smitten us. We lay hands on him; he is breathless, dizzy, but not dead. We turn him over, with his face to the sun, and we see no maimed, crushed, broken man, but a man shaken, much wounded, but resolute, self-contained as before. He is a philosopher.

But Bacon's career, that looks so like a painless flight, was eminently one of labour. When he stood proudest, an image of happiness, in the Temple of Fortune herself, in the eyes of his wondering fellows, there were pangs that qualified all joy. Now men scrawl on the base

* Implying in the original—“ Yesterday it was a glass broken, to-day it is a man dead."