against conspiracies, in the examination into a plot for the murder of Elizabeth; and in the preparation and conduct of elaborate holiday festivities at Gray's Inn.

Essex, being of the opinion that the Queen really set a high price on Bacon's services, acquainted her with his threat of retirement should he fail in procuring the long-sought preferment. This, it seems, produced a summons of Bacon to court. He did not see the Queen, but had an interview with his cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, who entertained him with a report of Elizabeth's anger that he should have presumed to hasten her decision. "Then Her Majesty sweareth that if I continue in this manner she will seek all England for a solicitor rather than take me; that she never dealt so with any as with me; she hath pulled me over the bar (note the words, for they cannot be her own). We (i. e. Bacon and his cousin) parted in kindness secundum exterius." Thus he writes to his brother, Anthony, and we infer that he suspected his cousin of secret enmity; and, instead of then replying to what Sir Robert said, he craved the privilege of putting his answer in writing, which he did in a letter to his cousin, disclaiming his purpose of travelling to have been a "present motion," or that he authorized Essex to make known his resolve, and referred to the latter for substantiation of this statement.

The favorite pressed his friend's suit urgently and eloquently, but in vain; for, on November 5th, 1596, Sergeant Fleming became Solicitor-General.

Disappointed and dejected, Bacon sought retirement and consolation. The villa of Essex afforded him an asylum, and philosophy gave him comfort.

The warm-hearted Earl shared his chagrin and

soothed his sorrow by giving him an estate worth £1,800. This, Bacon coquetted about accepting, but. accepted.

The embittered spirits of the two friends yielded to the influences of time, and Essex, with the aid of Bacon, celebrated the Queen's birthday, after the former had allayed her suspicious mind respecting his patronage of a book on the forbidden question of the succession. The publication, about this time, of Bacon's first edition of his Essays, ten in number, the "Colors of Good and Evil," and the "Meditationes Sacra" proclaimed to the world that the place-hunter was not only a place-hunter; and their reception must have more than consoled and comforted the author.

His friend Essex, in 1596, returned from the successful expedition against Cadiz, which might have conferred additional lustre on English arms if the Earl's advice had been followed, and Spain's Indian fleet engaged. As it was, Essex was met by rumors of charges against him, at court, by rivals jealous of his success and the fame it procured him; which was increased when it was discovered that Spain's Indian fleet placidly sailed into the Tagus, when it might have been intercepted, if the advice of Essex had prevailed.

A thorough appreciation of the Earl's impulsive nature, of his frank and unguarded conduct, of the jealousy which too great popularity with the people might excite in the Queen's breast, inspired Bacon to now write his friend a long letter of advice, which has more the tone of a Machiavelli than a moralist.

After asking the Earl "to consider, first, whether I have not reason to think that your fortune compre

hendeth mine," he urges him to "win the Queen;" then, picturing what an unfavorable turn to his relations with Elizabeth might be brought about by his enemies. using and abusing his popularity, his military renown, his very nearness to the Queen, he proceeds to advise how he may render the Queen unsusceptible to such influences, commending, in brief, a course of deceit. He says:

"Next, whereas I have noted you to fly and avoid (in some respect justly) the resemblance or imitation of my Lord of Leicester and my Lord Chancellor Hatton; yet I am persuaded (howsoever I wish your Lordship as distant as you are from them in points of favor, integrity, magnanimity, and merit,) that it will do you much good between the Queen and you, to allege them (as oft as you find occasion) for authors and patterns. For I do not know a readier mean to make Her Majesty think you are in your right way."

Next, he criticises his method of flattering the Queen, and commends a better course:

"Fourthly," he says, "your Lordship should never be without some particulars afoot, which you should seem to pursue with earnestness and affection, and then let them fail, upon taking knowledge of Her Majesty's opposition and dislike. A less weighty sort of particulars may be the pretense of some journeys, which, at Her Majesty's request, your Lordship mought relinquish; as if you would pretend a journey to see your living and estate towards Wales, or the like; for, as for great foreign journeys of employment and service, it standeth not with your gravity to play or stratagem with them."

The teacher was a thoughtful, contemplative, delib

erate man, a professed moralist and philosopher; the scholar was some years his junior, impressible, with a native-born disposition towards courageous frankness, and towards the taking of straight paths to a wishedfor goal.

A few years later, Bacon protested "that he had spent more time in vain in studying how to make the Earl a good servant to the Queen and State than he had done in anything else."

An appeal from Bacon to Bacon never fails to condemn the courtier out of the mouth of the philosopher.

Twenty years later he addressed a letter of advice to the favorite of another sovereign:

"You are now the king's favorite, so voted and so esteemed by all. You are as a continual sentinel, always to stand upon your watch, to give him true intelligence. If you flatter him, you betray him. If you conceal the truth of those things from him which concern his justice or his honor, although not the safety of his person, you are as dangerous a traitor to his state as he that riseth in arms against him. A false friend is more dangerous than an open enemy. Let him (the king) take on him this resolution, as King David did. There shall no deceitful person dwell in my house. . . . . But neither in jest nor earnest must there be countenance or ear given to flatterers or sycophants, the bane of all courts.” *

เ

The two letters differ in tone, because Bacon knew that Elizabeth would not see one, and that James I. would see the other.

Before dismissing the consideration of this remark

Advice to Villiers.

able letter to Essex, a further quotation will throw more light upon the almost inconceivable inconsistency between Bacon in politics and Bacon in the closet:

66

'Lastly, to be plain with your Lordship (for the gentlemen are such as I am beholden to), nothing can make the Queen or the world think so much that you are come to a provident care of your estate, as the altering of some of your officers, who, though they be as true to you as one hand to the other, yet opinio veritate major."

My singular good Lord! some of your officers have placed me under obligations to their kindness; they are as true as steel to you, but their dismissal from your service would be favorably commented on by the gossips, whose opinion is greater than truth; therefore I advise you to reward their consideration for me and faithfulness to you by turning them out into the cold.

During the chase for the place of Solicitor-General, the enemies of Bacon under-estimated his legal lore and ability to the Queen, so that she told Essex, that, while she acknowledged his friend's "excellent gift of speech, that in law she rather thought he could show to the uttermost than that he was deep."

Bacon now vindicated himself from this charge by writing his "Maxims" and "Use of the Common Law," - very valuable expositions of law as a science, as far as they went, and far more philosophical in treatment than contemporary works on the same subject.

His fortune did not keep pace with the fame which attended his writings; his practice, never lucrative,