truth that prince's character was, in every part of it, unamiable; and his conduct, on many occasions, weak or wicked. If my lord Bacon has not wholly escaped the infection of his age; if he has here and there attempted to brighten the imperfections, and throw in shades the bad features of the original he was drawing; yet, through these softenings, we can easily see this king as he was, and in all his genuine deformity. Suspicion and avarice, his own historian acknowledges, were the chief ingredients in his composition: and therefore his politics, both at home and abroad, were narrow, selfish, and false. Void of all great and extensive prudence, he endeavoured to supply that want by temporary shifts, and the little expedients of cunning. By these he commonly had Bacon, the luck to extricate himself out of difficulties, which Vol. V. a wiser man would have timely foreseen, and a better man have wholly prevented. But as his genius was unsociable and solitary, the darkness in his temper passed on mankind for depth and sagacity in his understanding. His avarice too, was sordid and shameless. Nothing seemed mean, nothing unjust in his eyes, that could fill his coffers and merely to fill them, for of wealth he had no enjoyment, he descended to arts of rapine no less scandalous than they were oppressive. I have acknowledged that my lord Bacon's History has been taxed of partiality, and I will not dissemble that his style has been objected to, as full of affectation, full of false eloquence. But that was the vice, not of the man, but of the times he lived in: and particularly of a court, that, after the sovereign's example, delighted in the tinsel of wit and writing, in the poor ingenuity of punning and quibbling. His Essays have, of all his works, been most current, and are still very justly esteemed. Towards the close of his life he greatly enlarged them both in number and weight; and published them anew, not only in English, but in a more universal language, which, he imagined, may preserve them as long as books shall last. As they are intended not to amuse p. 45. but instruct; as they are neither a satire on human Lettres nature, nor the school of scepticism; Monsieur de sur les Voltaire observes, that they have been less popular Anglois, than the maxims of Rochefoucault, or the Essays of p. 88. Montagne. A remark that does my lord Bacon honour; who was too great a man to court a reputation from the multitude, by sacrificing to that malignity, or indulging that curious extravagance, which too many readers, I am afraid, expect to find gratified, even in writings of a moral kind. Of the other works which he composed in this last scene of his life, I forbear to make any mention here they will be all enumerated in another place. Let me only observe, that nothing can give a more exalted idea of the fruitfulness and vigour of his genius, than the number and nature of those writings. Under the discouragement of a public censure, broken in his health, broken in his fortunes, he enjoyed his retirement not above five years: a little portion of time! yet he found means to crowd into it what might have been the whole business, and the glory too, of a long and fortunate life. Some of his former pieces he methodized and enriched: several new ones he composed, no less considerable for the greatness and variety of the arguments he treated, than for his manner of treating them. Nor are they works of mere erudition and labour, that require little else but strength of constitution and obstinate application: they are original efforts of genius and reflection, on subjects either new, or handled in a manner that makes them so. His notions he drew from his own fund; and they were solid, comprehensive, systematical; the disposition of his whole plan throwing light and grace on all the particular parts. In considering every subject, he seems to have placed himself in a point of view so advantageous and elevated, that he could from thence discover a whole country round him, and mark out the several spots of it, distinctly and with ease. These characters are equally due to the works in which he made some progress, and to those he could only attempt. His supposed poverty has been much insisted on, not only by our own writers, but by foreigners. Some Wilson. of the former have asserted, that he languished out a solitary being in obscurity and indigence: and among the latter, Le Clerc, who was led into the same notion by a passage in one of Howel's letters, has animadverted with an honest indignation on the meanness of that prince, who could leave such a man as he was to struggle, in his declining age, both with penury and affliction. I believe the matter has been exaggerated. Perhaps he did not enjoy affluence or entire ease of fortune: but his ordinary income must have placed him above sordid want and anxiety. Dr. Rawley, who lived long in his family, affirms that the king had given him, out of the broad seal and alienation office, to the value of eighteen hundred pounds a year; which, with his own lands, amounting to a third part more, he retained to his death. But then he had treasured up nothing in his prosperous condition against the day of adversity: and his pension was not only precarious, but ill-paid, by a king, who, instead of husbanding his revenues for great or good purposes, was daily lavishing them away, in fruitless negotiations, or on the least deserving of his subjects. Add to these things, that my lord Bacon lay all this time under the incumbrance of a vast debt; and that he had doubtless expended very considerable sums in procuring or making experiments. Even those, whom we see close and sparing on every other occasion, are yet profuse in gratifying a favourite passion. From all which arose that distress and those difficulties into which he was often plunged. That they were many and great, we can entertain no doubt.* It is but too strongly confirmed to us by some unusual expressions in his letters to king James; where we find him pouring out his heart in complaints and supplications of such a strain, as every one who reveres his It appears by a letter of Buckingham to him, that he asked for the provostship of Eton college, and was refused it. Bacon, Vol. V. memory will wish he had never uttered. Those who insist on the meanness, those who plead for the digCCLXXVI. nity, of human nature, may, in this one man, find abundant matter to support their several opinions. But, let us draw a veil over imperfections, and at the same time acknowledge, that a very ordinary penetration may serve to discover remarkable blemishes and failings in the most comprehensive minds, in the greatest characters, that ever adorned mortality. An. 1625. King James died in 1625; after an inglorious and à fatal reign of three and twenty years: despised by foreigners, despised and hated by his own subjects. The mischievous notions he broached, the perverse conduct he held, gave rise to those divisions that quickly after involved his kingdoms in all the guilt and misery of a civil war that shook the British constitution to its foundations, and in the end overturned it; though apparently framed to last for ages, as it had been ages in building up in building up and perfecting. His unfortunate chancellor survived him something above a year. The multiplicity of business and study in which he had been long engaged, but above all the anguish of mind he secretly laboured under, had undermined and broken into his health. After having been for some time infirm and declining, he owed his death at last to an excess, not unbecoming a philosopher; in pursuing, with more application than his strength could bear, certain experiments touching the conservation of bodies. He was so suddenly struck in his head and stomach, that he found himself obliged to retire into the earl of Arundel's house at Highgate, near which he then happened to be. There he sickened of a fever, attended with a defluxion on his breast; and, after a week's An. 1626. illness, expired; on the ninth of April, in the sixtysixth year of his age. How he bore this indisposition, or what discourses he held at the nearer approaches of death, no account is to be found; an omission which every reader must feel and regret: as nothing can awaken the attention, nothing affect the heart of man more strongly than the behaviour of Vol. V. eminent personages in their last moments; in that only scene of life wherein we are all sure, later or sooner to resemble them. There remains only a Bacon, letter, the last he ever wrote, addressed to that noble- Letter ccc. man under whose roof he died; in which he compares himself to a celebrated philosopher of antiquity, Pliny the elder; who lost his life by inquiring, with too dangerous a curiosity, into the first great eruption of Vesuvius. Thus lived and died the lord chancellor Bacon.* He was buried privately in St. Michael's church, near St. Alban's. The spot that contains his remains lay obscure and undistinguished, till the gratitude of a private man, formerly his servant, erected Sir Thomas a monument to his name and memory. In another Meautys. country, in a better age, his monument would have stood a public proof in what veneration the whole society held a citizen, whose genius did them honour, and whose writings will instruct their latest posterity. One passage in his will is remarkable. After bequeathing his soul and body in the usual form, he adds, "my name and memory I leave to foreign Baconiana, "nations; and to mine own countrymen, after some P. 203. 66 * He continued single till after forty, and then took to wife a daughter of alderman Barnham of London, with whom he received a plentiful fortune, but had by her no children : and she out-lived him upwards of twenty years. Such readers as have any curiosity to know what regimen he observed, may take the following account of it in the words of his chaplain. "His diet was rather plentiful and liberal than restrained. In his younger years he was much given to the finer and lighter sorts of meats: but after"wards he preferred the stronger, such as the shambles afforded: as those which bred the more firm and substantial juices, and "less dissipable. He did not, you may be sure, neglect that "himself, which he so much extolled to others in his writings, the 'frequent use of nitre; whereof he took the quantity of about "three grains in thin warm broth every morning, for thirty years together. His ordinary physic was a maceration of rhubarb, in"fused into a draught of white wine and beer mingled together "for the space of half an hour, once in six or seven days, immediately before his meal, whether dinner or supper; that it might "dry the body less. His receipt for the gout, which constantly gave him ease within two hours, is set down in the end of the "Natural History." See Vol. II. p. 225. 66 66 p. |