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Bacon
Letter

CXLII, to

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passed with regard to the earl's brother; that he now passionately wished the treaty might be renewed and accomplished; adding, that they should make their own terms of settlement, if his proposal was accepted. As the young lady was not only a celebrated beauty, but a great fortune, the person most interested made no difficulty to close with this proposal; and his mother recommended it to her second son with warmth. This alarmed the lord keeper Bacon. Ever jealous of Coke's reputation, and at odds with him, he dreaded his alliance with so powerful a family. His imagination suggested to him all the danger that threatened his present and future fortunes from this union and he could not forget that he had lately L. Coke. treated his antagonist with a freedom that rather insulted than admonished him. These apprehensions made him cast about how to defeat the intended match, by raising such objections to it as might touch the king and his favourite in point of public honour and advantage. His letters to both, on that occasion, are written with the perplexity of a man who fears something he is unwilling to own; which yet his prudence passes over with a seeming unconcern, to enlarge only upon considerations that regard those whom he would be thought to serve. But this management proved ineffectual. It was resented by the earl of Buckingham, and checked by a rough answer from the king. The lady Compton too, informed of the part he was acting, gave a loose to her tongue, and railed at him with a bitterness natural to women when they are thwarted in any favourite pursuit of interest or passion. Having thus, to prevent a distant and uncertain danger, involved himself in one that was real and immediate, he made no scruple to change sides at once; to go directly against his former opinion; and to offer unasked his interest in the young lady's mother for promoting the match he had just CLXXXIV. been labouring to disappoint. On such trivial accidents do the fortunes of ministers depend: and to such little and shameful arts is ambition often obliged to stoop. Nor even thus did he presently regain his

Letter

credit with Buckingham. The family continued to load him with reproaches; and he remained long under that agony of heart which an aspiring man must feel, when his power and dignity are at the mercy of a king's minion, young, and giddy with his elevation, and who thinks himself offended. They were however reconciled at last; and their friendship, if obsequiousness in one to all the humours of the other deserves the name of friendship, continued without interruption for some years; while Buckingham went on daily to place and displace the great officers of the crown, as wantonness of fancy, or anger, or interest led him; to recommend or discountenance every private person who had a suit depending in any court, just as he was influenced; to authorize and protect every illegal project, that could serve most speedily to enrich himself or his kindred. In a word, he became formidable even to the master who had raised him from the dust, and who should have still awed him by his authority: and this amidst the dissipation of a life, given up to idle amusements, or sullied with criminal pleasures.

In the beginning of 1619, Sir Francis Bacon was An. 1619: created lord high Chancellor of England, and shortly after baron of Verulam; which title he exchanged the year following, for that of viscount St. Albans. Such events in his life as these may be passed over slightly he was so great a man, that external honours could add no lustre to his name. Indeed had they been the immediate reward of those nobler services he had done, and was still meditating to do his country, they might deserve more particular notice, for the sake of him who bestowed them.

Neither the weight and variety of business, nor the pomps of a court, could divert his attention from the study of philosophy. Those were his avocations and incumbrances; this was his beloved employment, and almost the only pleasure in which he indulged his freer and better hours. He gave to the public in 1620 his Novum Organon, as a second part to his An. 1620. grand Instauration of the Sciences: a work that for

twelve years together he had been methodizing, altering, and polishing; till he had laboured the whole into a series of aphorisms, as it now appears. Of all his writings this seems to have undergone the strictest revision, and to be finished with the severest judgment. Indeed the form into which it is cast admits of nothing foreign, of nothing merely ornamental. The lights and embellishments of imagination, the grace and harmony of style, are rejected here, as beauties either superfluous, or of an inferior nature. The author has, besides, made use of several terms in a new and peculiar sense, which may have discouraged some readers, as it has made others imagine them equally unintelligible with the horrors of a vacuum, the quiddities, and substantial forms, of the philosophy which he attempted to discredit: and therefore, of all his writings it has been the least read, or understood. It was intended as a more useful, a more extensive logic than the world had yet been acquainted with: an art not conversant about syllogisms, and modes of argumentation, that may be serviceable sometimes in arranging truths already known, or in detecting fallacies that lie concealed among our own reasonings and those of other men; but an art inventive of arts: productive of new discoveries, real, important, and of general use to human life. This he proposed, by turning our attention from notions to things; from those subtle and frivolous speculations that dazzle, not enlighten, the understanding, to a sober and sensible investigation of the laws and powers of nature, in a way becoming sages who make truth and information the sole aim of their inquiries. In order to this, his first endeavour was to weed out of the mind such errors as naturally grow in it, or have been planted there by education, and cherished by the influence of men, whose writings had long claimed a right of prescription to rule and mislead mankind. To a mind thus prepared for instruction, he proposes the second and scientifical part of his scheme, the true method of interpreting nature, by fact and observation; by sound and ge

nuine induction, widely differing from that puerile art which till then had solely prevailed in philosophy. His requires a sufficient, an accurate collection of instances, gathered with sagacity and recorded with impartial plainness, on both sides of the question: from which, after viewing them in all possible lights, to be sure that no contradictory instances can be brought, some portion of useful truth, leading on to further discoveries, may be at last fairly deduced. In this way, experiments and reasonings grow up together, to support and illustrate each other mutually, in every part of science.

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As we are now approaching towards the most An. 1621. memorable event of our author's public life, which ended in a melancholy reverse of his fortune and honour, it will be necessary to trace, step by step, the causes that produced it: especially as the affair has not been hitherto considered in the point of view that renders it most interesting and instructive. It will, I believe, appear with evidence, that, whatever his crimes might be, he was sacrificed to the safety of another, far more criminal than himself: and that this was the act of an ill-judging master, with whom it was a greater merit to be amusing in any degree, than to be serviceable in the greatest.

Among the weaknesses of king James, his vanity was the most pernicious to his own family, and to the nation in general. He placed an infinite value on certain chimerical advantages that met in his person; on that inherent right by which, he pretended, the crown of England was devolved to him; on his long acquaintance with the prime mysteries of government; and on his uncommon accomplishments in learning. His favourite maxim was, that he who knows not how to dissemble, knows not how to reign but he seems not to have heard of a second maxim, without which the first cannot be successful, even for a time; to conceal every appearance of cunning, and to deceive under the guise of candour and good faith. He, on the contrary, shewed his whole game at once, to his own subjects and to

Hacket, P. 50.

foreigners alike: so that in his attempts upon the former, in his negotiations with the latter, this Solomon was the only dupe. A great share of learning he certainly had, but of learning that a king ought not to be acquainted with; the very refuse of the schools, which served for little else but to furnish him with an impertinent fluency, on every subject: and he indulged himself in the sovereign pedantry of setting it to show, on every occasion. On all these heads, he was extolled without measure by the most pestilent of flatterers, grave and reverend ecclesiastics : for which, and because they encouraged him in an unprincely application of his talent, he, on many occasions, made his power the mean instrument to gratify their passions and lust of dominion. They, in return, found out for him a title antecedent and superior to human laws, even a divine right of being weak or wicked, without controul. And this doctrine, horrible as it is, they dared to derive from Scripture : where if it could be found, which to affirm were blasphemy, it would be the triumph of infidelity, and demonstration that those sacred writings were inspired, not by God, but by some being, his opposite and the enemy of all goodness. This doctrine, meeting with his own perverted habits of thinking, made king James look upon his subjects as slaves; upon his parliaments as usurpers of a power to which they had no right, or at best a precarious one: and he had now, for seven years together, affected to govern without them; to set up an interest separate from that of his people, and to supply his wants by all ways and means, but such as the constitution prescribed. These methods were suggested to him by the worst enemies of the commonwealth, the tribe of projectors and monopolists: miscreants who sheltered themselves under the name and influence of Buckingham, and who repaid his protection extravagantly, at the expence of a people whom they were grinding and devouring. His mother too, now created a countess in her own right, a woman born for mischief, of a meddling spirit and insatiably greedy, was deep in

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