daughter of Benedict Barnham, a merchant who had been both alderman and sheriff of London.

Meantime Sir Francis Bacon kept his application for the post of Solicitor-General well before the Court of the new King. If the indifference of his cousin, Sir Robert Cecil, now Earl of Salisbury, and the ill-will of Sir Edward Coke, his legal rival, doomed him ever to new disappointment, Cecil and Coke at least found in Bacon a persistence worthy of a better cause than office-seeking. Elizabeth Bacon, his half-sister, had made a third marriage with Sir William Periam, Chief Baron of the Exchequer. Sir William Periam died in 1604, and was succeeded as Chief Baron by the Solicitor-General, Sir Thomas Fleming. Bacon hoped to get the vacant Solicitor-Generalship, but it went for a second time over his head and. was given to Sir John Doderidge. A third set-back followed two years later. In 1606, Sir Edward Coke was made Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas. It had been the custom under Queen Elizabeth to promote the Solicitor-General to the office of Attorney-General in case of its vacancy, but it suited King James to select Sir Henry Hobart for Attorney-General to succeed Coke, thus avoiding a vacancy in the Solicitor-Generalship. A year later Sir John Doderidge was promoted out of the way, and at last, "silently, on the 25th of June," 1607, Sir Francis Bacon was appointed Solicitor-General. He was forty-seven years old and had been applying for the position. for fourteen years.

With an assured official income and the private

means he had acquired as his brother's heir, Bacon was for the first time relieved from pressing pecuniary anxieties. He was free to devote what leisure he could secure to those "vast contemplative ends" which in his better moments he always regarded as his real interest in life. Now, too, he reaped the rich harvest of the long years of his unpaid apprenticeship. Queen Elizabeth had thought him a theorist in the law, and had caused him to serve twice seven years roving afield in practice. The result was that when Sir Francis Bacon became Solicitor-General, he brought to the discharge of his duties such a wealth of knowledge of the law, in both theory and practice, as none of his predecessors were able to approach, and some of them had been very able lawyers. At the same time, and this fact is often not even mentioned by Francis Bacon's biographers, at the same time, through repeated disappointments, through insecure health, through anxiety, through loneliness, through calumny, this extraordinary man had kept up his studies and meditations. They were carried on as we know in hours stolen from sleep, between sessions of Parliament, during the few holidays of a busy life, and always under physical difficulties, for the essay Of Regiment of Health reflects Bacon's personal experience in managing a mind too active for the body it inhabited. Bacon came into his own late in life, but when success found him, his rise was rapid. Within ten years after obtaining the Solicitor-Generalship, he had reached the top of his profession as Lord Chancellor; within twenty years

he had published the books which have made his fame "a possession forever" wherever the English language and literature shall spread.

In 1613, by the death of Sir Thomas Fleming and the promotions of Sir Edward Coke and Sir Henry Hobart, Sir Francis Bacon succeeded Hobart as Attorney-General. In 1616, he was made a Privy Councillor; nine months later, March 7, 1617, the Great Seal was delivered into his hands and he had followed his father as Lord Keeper; nine months later still, January 4, 1618, he became Lord Chancellor, and in July following was created Baron Verulam; January 27, 1621, the still higher title of Viscount St. Alban was conferred upon him.

During these years Bacon wrote much. To the year 1609 belongs the treatise De Sapientia Veterum, or of the Wisdom of the Ancients, which he describes in the preface as a recreation from severer studies. It is a collection of thirty-one classical myths, each with a second title in English, often one word only, giving Bacon's interpretation of the myth; for example, Perseus; or War, Sphinx; or Science. The stories are remarkably well told, and should be better known than they are. In 1612, the second edition of the Essays, now enlarged from ten to thirty-eight, was published. Bacon's mother, Lady Anne Cooke Bacon, died in the interval between these two works, in August, 1610. Two masques belonging to this period tell us what was happening to him of a less grave nature. The Princess Elizabeth was married to the Elector Palatine, February 4, 1613, and the gentlemen of Gray's Inn

and the Inner Temple gave a masque in honor of the event, called The Marriage of the Thames and the Rhine. Francis Beaumont was the author and Sir Francis Bacon the "chief contriver.” On January 6, 1614, the gentlemen of Gray's Inn presented The Masque of Flowers, in celebration of the marriage of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, with Lady Frances Howard, the divorced wife of Essex's son, Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex. Sir Francis Bacon, the new Attorney-General, was the "chief encourager" of this masque, which is said to have cost him £2000.

All this while, during more than thirty years, the great philosophical work of Bacon's life was going on, getting itself written in sketches and treatises, under different subjects, and in separate parts, as time permitted. He had called it as a mere boy Temporis Partus Maximus, 'The Greatest Birth of Time.' About 1607, the title Instauratio Magna, that is, 'Great Restoration' appears. When the work finally saw the light in October, 1620, still incomplete, it bore the name Novum Organum, or 'New Organ.'

Within six months after the publication of the Novum Organum, Francis Bacon was overwhelmed in the appalling catastrophe which deprived him at one stroke of position, power, and good fame. He had been created Viscount St. Alban, January 27, 1621. On January 30 Parliament met. Five days later Sir Edward Coke, Bacon's life-long rival, moved that a committee be appointed to inquire into public grievances. Two committees were

named, to investigate monopolies and to report on the administration of the courts of justice. This latter committee reported to the House of Commons, March 15, that the Lord Chancellor was guilty of corruption in office, and cited two cases of bribery as proof. Bacon fell ill, and sat in the House of Lords for the last time on March 17. He wrote to the Duke of Buckingham, he had an interview with the King, but he was only referred back to the Commons. By the middle of April the two original charges had increased to twenty-three. At first Bacon was inclined to meet the charges against him and to defend his honor, but his judgment wavered from day to day. He wrote to the King, April 20, asking for the charges in particular. The next day, April 21, it occurred to him that he might weather the "tempest that had come upon him" by a general submission, and he wrote again,

"I assure myself that if it be reformation that be sought, the very taking away the Seal, upon my general submission, will be as much an example for these four hundred years as any further severity." On the following day, April 22, he sent a letter to the Lords, entitled, The Humble Submission and Supplication of the Lord Chancellor, in which he said, "I do ingenuously confess and acknowledge that, having understood the particulars of the charge, not formally from the House, but enough to inform my conscience and memory, I find matter sufficient and full, both to move me to desert the defence, and to move your Lordships to condemn and censure me." The