PART I. FROM BIRTH OF BACON TO DEATH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH. Nearly three hundred years ago, Francis Bacon died, and was buried in the country church of St. Michael's. The solemn sentence "Dust to dust, ashes to ashes," has long since been fulfilled, and all that was mortal of a great philosopher has become as earthy as the remains of the pauper whom the same inevitable event consigned to the potter's field. The memory of a bad man is sometimes preserved for a time to point a moral; that of a philanthropist lives in his monuments to the brotherhood of humanity; the memories of kings and conquerors flit like troubled ghosts through the pages of history; but it is only the name of the thinker of great thoughts, the writer of profound and beautiful truths, the pioneer of principles reaching in their beneficent benevolence to remote generations, that foreign nations and after ages cherish with intellectual veneration. This is the tribute paid to Francis Bacon. His essays are recognized as a source of the soundest principles of social and moral philosophy; his Advancement of Learning as a most able and eloquent defense of the utility of knowledge; his Novum Organum as the missionary of philosophical inquiry among Englishspeaking people; his Church Controversies and other religious tracts as abounding in golden maxims of Christian conservatism; his Orders in Chancery as the basis of equity practice in English jurisprudence ;* his legal tracts and speeches as giving an impulse to the study of Jaw as a science, and as suggesting many wise reforms in legislation; his political tracts and speeches as inculcating principles of wise government; his thoughts on education as anticipating some of the successful experiments of later times; and his Apothegms as a clever jest-book. To read his works and not know the author is treading but an arc of the circle. His life teaches as profound lessons as his pen. And when the frailty and folly of the man are contrasted with the morality and wisdom of the writer, a most curious exhibition of inconsistency is presented to the student of human nature. The object of this sketch is to outline him in his two rôles of Truth-seeker and Place-hunter, in his courage and cowardice, strength and weakness, glory and shame. To form a fair estimate of any historical character, it is necessary to consider the times in which he lived; to know something of those who guided his infancy, influenced his youth, surrounded his manhood, and with whose destinies his own fate was interwoven. For, although we come into this world alone, and go out of it alone, none of us live in it alone. Our lives are mingled together as warp and woof; in every stage * Campbell's "Lives of the Lord Chancellors," vol. ii., p. 434; Basil Montagu's "Bacon's Works," vol. xvi., p. 242. |