Marriage
Towards his rising years, not before, he entered into a married estate, and took to wife Alice, one of the daughters and coheirs of Benedict Barnham, Esquire and Alderman of London; with whom he received a sufficiently ample and liberal portion in marriage. 11 Children he had none; which, though they be the means to perpetuate our names after our deaths, yet he bade other issues to perpetuate his name, the issues of his brain; in which he was ever happy and admired, as Jupiter was in the production of Pallas. Neither did the want of children detract from his good usage of his consort during the intermarriage, whom he prosecuted with much conjugal love and respect, with many rich gifts and endowments, besides a robe of honour which he invested her withal; which she wore unto her dying day, being twenty years and more after his death. 22 The last five years of his life, being withdrawn from civil affairs 33 and from an active life, he employed wholly in contemplation and studies a thing where of his lordship would often speak during his active life, as if he affected to die in the shadow and not in the light; which also may be found in several passages of his works. In which time he composed the greatest part of his books and writings, both in English and Latin, which I will enumerate (as near as I can) in the just order wherein they were written: 44 The History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh; Abcedarium Nature, or a Metaphysical piece which is lost; 55 Historia Ventorum; Historia Vitce et Mortis; Historia Densi et Rari, not yet printed; 66 Historia Crravis et Levis, which is also lost; 77 a Discourse of a War with Spain; a Dialogue touching an Holy War; the Fable of the New Atlantis; a Preface to a Digest of the Laws of England; the beginning of the History of the Reign of King Henry the Eighth; De Augmentis Scientiarum, or the Advancement of Learning, put into Latin, 88 with several enrichments and enlargements; Counsels Civil and Moral, or his book of Essays, likewise enriched and enlarged; the Conversion of certain Psalms into English Verse; the Translation into Latin of the History of King Henry the Seventh, of the Counsels Civil and Moral, 99 the Dialogue of the Holy War, of the Fable of the New Atlantis, for the benefit of other nations; his revising of his book De Sapientid Veterum; Inquisitio de Magnete; Topica Inquisitionis de Luce et Lumine; both these not yet printed; 1010 lastly, Sylva Sylvarum, or the Natural History. These were the fruits and productions of his last five years. His lordship also designed, upon the motion and invitation of his late majesty, to have written the reign of King Henry the Eighth; but that work perished in the designation merely, God not lending him life to proceed farther upon it than only in one morning’s work; whereof there is extant an exungue leonem, already printed in his lordship’s Miscellany Works.
There is a commemoration due as well to his abilities and virtues as to the course of his life. Those abilities which commonly go single in other men, though of prime and observable parts, were all conjoined and met in him. Those are, sharpness of wit, memory, judgment, and elocution. For the former three his books do abundantly speak them; which with what sufficiency he wrote, let the world judge; but with what celerity he wrote them, I can best testify. But for the fourth, his elocution, I will only set down what I heard Sir Walter Raleigh once speak of but he gave them a weightier title when he had them translated into “the general language:” That the Earl of Salisbury was an excellent speaker, but no good penman; that the Earl of Northampton (the Lord Henry Howard) was an excellent pen man, but no good speaker; but that Sir Francis Bacon was eminent in both.
I have been induced to think, that if there were a beam of knowledge derived from God upon any man in these modern times, it was upon him. For though he was a great reader of books, yet he had not his knowledge from books [only], but from some grounds and notions from within himself; which, notwithstanding, he vented with great caution and circumspection. His book of Instauratio Magnet (which in his own account was the chiefest of his works) was no slight imagination or fancy of his brain, but a settled and concocted notion, the production of many years labour and travel. I myself have seen at the least twelve copies of the Instauration, revised year by year one after another, and every year altered and amended in the frame thereof, till at last it came to that model in which it was committed to the press; as many living creatures do lick their young ones, till they bring them to their strength of limbs.
1 1. It appears, from a manuscript preserved in Tenison’s Library, that he had about 220l., a year with his wife, and upon her mother’s death was to have about 140l., a year more.
2 2. Spedding: By the “robe of honour” is meant, I presume, the title of Viscountess. It appears however that a few months before Bacon’s death his wife had given him some cause of grave offence. Special provision is made for her in the body of his will, but revoked in a codicil, “for just and great causes,” the nature of which is not specified. Soon after his death she married Sir John Underwood, her gentleman-usher. She was buried at Eyworth in Bedfordshire on the 29th of June 1650.
3 3. Spedding: On the 3rd of May 1621, Bacon was condemned, upon a charge of corruption to which he pleaded guilty, to pay a fine of 40.000 pounds; to be imprisoned in the Tower during the King’s pleasure; to be forever incapable of sitting in Parliament or holding office in the state; and to be banished for life from the verge of the court. From that time his only business was to find means of subsistence and of satisfying his creditors, and to pursue his studies. His offence was the taking of presents from persons who had suits in his court, in some cases while the suit was still pending; an act which undoubtedly amounted to corruption as corruption was defined by the law. The degree of moral criminality involved in it is not so easily ascertained. To judge of this, we should know, first, what was the understanding, open or secret, upon which the presents were given and taken, for a gift, though it be given to a judge, is not necessarily in the nature of a bargain to pervert justice: secondly, to what extent the practice was prevalent at the time, for it is a rare virtue in a man to resist temptations to which all his neighbours yield: thirdly, how far it was tolerated, for a practice may be universally condemned and yet universally tolerated; people may be known to be guilty of it and yet received in society all the same: fourthly, how it stood with regard to other abuses prevailing at the same time, for it is hard to reform all at once, and it is one thing for a man to leave a single abuse unreformed while he is labouring to remove or resist greater ones, and another thing to introduce it anew, or to leave all as it was, making no effort to remove any. Now all this is from the nature of the case very difficult to ascertain. But the whole question, as it regards Bacon’s character, must be considered in connexion with the rest of his political life, and will be fully discussed in its place in the Occasional Works; where all the evidence I can find shall be faithfully exhibited. In this place it may be enough to say that he himself always admitted the taking of presents as he had taken them to be indefensible, the sentence to be just, and the example salutary; and yet always denied that he had been an unjust judge, or “had ever had bribe or reward in his eye or thought when he pronounced any sentence or order;” and that I cannot find any reason for doubting that this was true. It is stated, indeed, in a manuscript of Sir Matthew Male’s, published by Hargrave, that the censure of Bacon “for many decrees made upon most gross bribery and corruption, gave such a discredit and brand to the decrees thus obtained that they were easily set aside;” and it is true that some bills were brought into the House of Commons or the purpose of setting aside such decrees; but I cannot find that any one of them reached a third reading; and it is clear from Sir Matthew’s own argument that he could not produce an instance of one reversed by the House of Lords; and if any had been reversed by a royal commission appointed for the purpose (which according to his statement was the only remaining way), it must surely have been heard of; yet where is the record of any such commission? Now if of all the decrees so discredited none were reversed, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that they had all been made bona fide with regard only to the merits of the cases, and were in fact unimpeachably just; and we may believe that Bacon pronounced a true judgment on his own case when he said to his friends (as I find it recorded in a commonplace book of Dr. Rawley’s in the Lambeth Library), “I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years; but it was the justest censure in parliament that was these two hundred years.”
4 4. In the Latin version Dr. Rawley adds, quamprcesens observavi; which gives this list a peculiar value.
5 5. A fragment of this piece was recovered and printed by Tenison in the Baconiana.
6 6. This was true in 1657; but it was printed the next year in the Opuscula Philosophica; and, therefore, for “not yet printed,” the Latin version substitutes jamprimum typis mandata. In the edition of 1661 a corresponding alteration ought to have been made in the English, but was not; and as the words occur in one of the cancelled leaves they must have been left by oversight.
7 7. This was probably the tract which Gruter says he once had in his hands, and which he describes as merely a skeleton, exhibiting heads of chapters not filled up.
8 8. We learn also from the Latin version that Bacon worked at the translation of the Advancement of Learning himself.
9 9. These were the Essays as they appeared in the third and last edition.
10 10. These words are omitted in the Latin version, and must have been left by oversight in the edition of 1661; for they occur in one of the cancelled leaves; and the works in question had been printed in 1658. The error is the more worth noticing because it shows that wherever the English and the Latin differ, the Latin must be regarded as the later and better authority.
The Works
In the composing of his books he did rather drive at a masculine and clear expression than at any fineness or affectation of phrases, and would often ask if the meaning were expressed plainly enough, as being one that accounted words to be but subservient or ministerial to matter, and not the principal. And if his style were polite, it was because he would do no otherwise. Neither was he given to any light conceits, or descanting upon words, but did ever purposely and industriously avoid them; for he held such things to be but digressions or diversions from the scope intended, and to derogate from the weight and dignity of the style.
He was no plodder upon books; though he read much and that with great judgment and rejection of impertinences incident to many authors; for he would ever interlace a moderate relaxation of his mind with his studies, as walking, or taking the air abroad in his coach, 1111 or some other befitting recreation; and yet he would lose no time, inasmuch as upon his first and immediate return he would fall to reading again, and so suffer no moment of time to slip from him without some present improvement.
His meals were reflections of the ear as well as of the stomach, like the Noctes Atticae, [title of a book by
Gellius, the great Roman essayist and recounter of
anecdotes] or Convivia Deipnosophistarum, wherein a man might be refreshed in his mind and understanding no less than in his body. And I have known some, of no mean parts, that have professed to make use of their note-books when they have risen from his table. In which conversations, and otherwise, he was no dashing man, 1212 as some men are, but ever a countenancer and fosterer of another man’s parts. Neither was he one that would appropriate the speech wholly to himself, or delight to outwit others, but leave a liberty to the co-assessors to take their turns. Wherein he would draw a man on and allure him to speak upon such a subject, as wherein he was peculiarly skilful, and would delight to speak. And for himself, he contemned no man’s observations, but would light his torch at every man’s candle.
His opinions and assertions were for the most part binding, and not contradicted by any; rather like oracles than discourses; which may be imputed either to the well weighing of his sentence by the scales of truth and reason, or else to the reverence and estimation wherein he was commonly had, that no man would contest with him; so that there was no argumentation, or pro and con (as they term it), at his table: or if there chanced to be any, it was carried with much submission and moderation.
I have often observed, and so have other men of great account, that if he had occasion to repeat another man’s words after him, he had an use and faculty to dress them in better vestments and apparel than they had before; so that the author should find his own speech much amended, and yet the substance of it still retained; 1313 as if it had been natural to him to use good forms, as Ovid spake of his faculty of versifying. 1414
When his office called him, as he was of the King’s council learned, to charge any offenders, either in criminals or capitals, he was never of an insulting and domineering nature over them, but always tender hearted, and carrying himself decently towards the parties (though it was his duty to charge them home), but yet as one that looked upon the example with the eye of severity, but upon the person with the eye of pity and compassion. And in civil business, as he was counsellor of estate, he had the best way of advising, not engaging his master in any precipitate or grievous courses, but in moderate and fair proceedings: the King whom he served giving him this testimony, that he ever dealt in business suavibus modis; which was the way that was most according to his own heart. Neither was he in his time less gracious with the subject than with his sovereign. He was ever acceptable to the House of Commons when he was a member thereof. Being the King’s attorney, and chosen to a place in Parliament, he was allowed and dispensed with to sit in the House; which was not permitted to other attorneys. 1515 And as he was a good servant to his master, being never in nineteen years service (as himself averred) rebuked by the King for anything relating to His Majesty, so he was a good master to his servants, and rewarded their long attendance with good places freely 1616 when they fell into his power; which was the cause that so many young gentlemen of blood and quality sought to list themselves in his retinue. And if he were abused by any of them in their places, it was only the error of the goodness of his nature, but the badges of their indiscretions and intemperances.
This lord was religious: for though the world be apt to suspect and prejudge great wits and politics to have somewhat of the atheist, yet he was conversant with God, as appeareth by several passages through out the whole current of his writings. Otherwise he should have crossed his own principles, which were, that a little philosophy maketh men apt to forget God, as attributing too much to second causes; but depth of philosophy bringeth a man back to God again. Now I am sure there is no man that will deny him, or account otherwise of him, but to have him been a deep philosopher. And not only so; but he was able to render a reason of the hope which was in him, which that writing of his of the Confession of the Faith doth abundantly testify. He repaired frequently, when his health would permit him, to the service of the church, to hear sermons, to the administration of the sacrament of the blessed body and blood of Christ; and died in the true faith, established in the Church of England.
This is most true he was free from malice, which (as he said himself) he never bred nor fed. 1717 He was no revenger of injuries; which if he had minded, he had both opportunity and place high enough to have done it. He was no heaver of men out of their places, as delighting in their ruin and undoing. He was no defamer of any man to his prince. One day, when a great statesman was newly dead, that had not been his friend, the King asked him, what he thought of that lord which was gone? he answered, that he would never have made His Majesty’s estate better, but he was sure he would have kept it from being worse; which was the worst he would say of him: which I reckon not among his moral, but his Christian virtues.
11 11. In the Latin version Dr. Rawley adds gentle exercise on horseback and playing at bowls.
12 12. The word dash is used here in the same sense in Avhich Costard uses it in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “There, ain’t please you; a foolish, mild man; an honest man, look you, and soon dashed:” Dr. Rawley means that Bacon was not a man who used his wit, as some do, to put his neighbours out of countenance.
13 13. This is probably the true explanation of a habit of Bacon’s which seems at first sight a fault, and perhaps sometimes is; and of which a great many instances have been pointed out by Mr. Ellis; a habit of inaccurate quotation. In quoting an author’s words, especially where he quotes them merely by way of voucher for his own remark, or in acknowledgment.
14 14. Of the source whence he derived it, or to suggest an allusion which may give a better effect to it, he very often quotes inaccurately. Sometimes, no doubt, this was unintentional, the fault of his memory; but more frequently, I suspect, it was done deliberately, for the sake of presenting the substance in a better form, or a form better suited to the particular occasion. In citing the evidence of witnesses, on the contrary, in support of a narrative statement or an argument upon matter of fact, he is always very careful. As an edition of Bacon would hardly be complete unless it contained Ben Jonson’s famous description of his manner of speaking, I shall insert it here: “Yet there happened in my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in his speaking. His language (where he could spare or pass by a jest) was nobly censorious. No man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weightily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he spoke; and had his judges angry and pleased at his devotion. No man had their affections more in his power. The fear of every man that heard him was, lest he should make an end.” Discoveries: under title Dominus Verulamius.
15 15. A statement of the truth of which abundant evidence may be found in all the records which remain of the proceedings of the House of Commons. The first Parliament in which he sat was that of 1584: after which he sat in every Parliament that was summoned up to the time of his fall.
16 16. Gratis, in the Latin version; i.e. without taking any money for them; an unusual thing in Bacon’s time, when the sale of offices was a principal source of all great men’s incomes.
17 17. “He said he had breeding swans and feeding swans; but for malice, he neither bred it nor fed it.” From a commonplace book of Dr. Rawley’s in the Lambeth Library.
His Fame
His fame is greater and sounds louder in foreign parts abroad, than at home in his own nation; thereby verifying that divine sentence, A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house. Concerning which I will give you a taste only, out of a letter written from Italy (the storehouse of refined wits) to the late Earl of Devonshire, then the Lord Candish: I will expect the new essays of my Lord Chancellor Bacon, as also his History, with a great deal of desire, and whatsoever else he shall compose: but in particular of his History promise myself a thing perfect and singular, especially in Henry the Seventh, where he may exercise the talent of his divine understanding. This lord is more and more known, and his books here more and more delighted in; and those men that have more than ordinary knowledge in human affairs, esteem him one of the most capable spirits of this age; and he is truly such. Now his fame doth not decrease with days since, but rather increase. Divers of his works have been anciently and yet lately translated into other tongues, both learned and modern, by foreign pens. Several persons of quality, during his lordship’s life, crossed the seas on purpose to gain an opportunity of seeing him and discoursing with him; whereof one carried his lordship’s picture 1818 from head to foot over with him into France, as a thing which he foresaw would be much desired there, that so they might enjoy the image of his person as well as the images of his brain, his books. Amongst the rest, Marquis Fiat, a French nobleman, who came ambassador into England, in the beginning of Queen Mary, wife to King Charles, was taken with an extraordinary desire of seeing him; for which he made way by a friend; and when he came to him, being then through weakness confined to his bed, the marquis saluted him with this high expression, that his lordship had been ever to him like the angels; of whom he had often heard, and read much of them in books, but he never said them. After which they contracted an intimate acquaintance, and the marquis did so much revere him, that besides his frequent visits, they wrote letters one to the other, under the titles and appellations of father and son. As for his many salutations by letters from foreign worthies devoted to learning, I forbear to mention them, because that is a thing common to other men of learning or note, together with him.
But yet, in this matter of his fame, I speak in the comparative only, and not in the exclusive. For his reputation is great in his own nation also, especially amongst those that are of a more acute and sharper judgment; which I will exemplify but with two testimonies and no more. The former, when his History of King Henry the Seventh was to come forth, it was delivered to the old Lord Brook, to be perused by him; who, when he had dispatched it, returned it to the author with this eulogy, Commend me to my lord, and bid him take care to get good paper and ink, for the work is incomparable. The other shall be that of Doctor Samuel Collins, late provost of King’s College in Cambridge, a man of no vulgar wit, who affirmed unto me, that when he had read the book of the Advancement of Learning, he found himself in a case to begin his studies anew, and that he had lost all the time of his studying before.
18 18. This picture was presented to him by Bacon himself, according to the Latin version.
His Health
It hath been desired, that something should be signified touching his diet, and the regimen of his health, of which, in regard of his universal insight into nature, he may perhaps be to some an example. For his diet, it was rather a plentiful and liberal diet, as his stomach would bear it, than a restrained; which he also commended in his book of the History of Life and Death. In his younger years he was much given to the finer and lighter sort of meats, as of fowls, and such like; but afterward, when he grew more judicious, 1919 he preferred the stronger meats, such as the shambles afforded, as those meats which bred the more firm and substantial juices of the body, and less disposable; upon which he would often make his meal, though he had other meats upon the table. You may be sure he would not neglect that himself, which he so much extolled in his writings, and that was the use of nitre; whereof he took in the quantity of about three grains in thin warm broth every morning, for thirty years together next before his death. And for physic, he did indeed live physically, but not miserably; for he took only a maceration of rhubarb, infused 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; which (as he said) did carry away frequently the grosser humours of the body, and not diminish or carry away any of the spirits, as sweating doth. And this was no grievous thing to take. As for other physic, in an ordinary way (whatsoever hath been vulgarly spoken) he took not. His receipt for the gout, which did constantly ease him of his pain within two hours, is already set down in the end of the Natural History.
It may seem the moon had some principal place in the figure of his nativity: for the moon was never in her passion, or eclipsed, 2020 but he was surprised with a sudden fit of fainting; and that, though he observed not nor took any previous knowledge of the eclipse thereof; and as soon as the eclipse ceased, he was restored to his former strength again.
19 19. More judicious (that is) by experience and observation: experientid edoctus is the expression in the Latin version.
20 20. Lord Campbell (who appears to have read Dr. Rawley’s memoir only in the Latin, where the words are quoties luna defecit sive edipsinpassa est), supposing defecit to mean waned, discredits this statement, on the ground that “no instance is recorded of Bacon’s having fainted in public, or put off the hearing of any cause on account of the change of the moon, or of any approaching eclipse, visible or invisible.” And it is true that indefectus lunae meant a change of the moon, or even a dark moon (which it might have meant well enough if the Romans had not chosen to appropriate the word to quite another meaning), the accident must have happened in public too often to pass unnoticed. But Dr. Rawley was too good a scholar to misapply so common a word in that way. He evidently speaks of eclipses only, and of eclipses visible at the place. Now it is not at all likely that lunar eclipses visible at Westminster would have coincided with important business in which Bacon was conspicuously engaged, often enough (even if he did faint every time) to establish a connexion between the two phenomena. Of course Dr. Rawley’s statement is not sufficient to prove the reality of any such connexion; but there is no reason to suppose it an invention and the fact of the fainting-fits may be fairly taken, I think, as evidence of the extreme delicacy of Bacon’s temperament, and its sensibility to the sky influences. That Bacon himself never alluded to this relation between himself and the moon is easily accounted for by supposing that he was not satisfied of the fact. He may have observed the coincidence, and mentioned it to Dr. Rawley and he (whose common place book proves that he had a taste for astrology) may have believed in the physical connexion, though Bacon himself did not.
His Eternal Living
He died on the ninth day of April in the year 1626, in the early morning of the day then celebrated for our Saviour’s resurrection, in the sixty-sixth year of his age, at the Earl of Arundel’ s house in Highgate, near London, to which place he casually repaired about a week before; God so ordaining that he should die there of a gentle fever, accidentally accompanied with a great cold, whereby the defluxion of rheum fell so plentifully upon his breast, that he died by suffocation; and was buried in St. Michael’s church at St. Albans being the place designed for his burial by his last will and testament, both because the body of his mother was interred there, and because it was the only church then remaining within the precincts of old Verulam: where he hath a monument erected for him in white marble (by the care and gratitude of Sir Thomas Meautys, knight, formerly his lordship’s secretary, afterwards clerk of the King’s Honourable Privy Council under two kings); representing his full portraiture in the posture of studying, with an inscription composed by that accomplished gentleman and rare wit, Sir Henry Wotton. But howsoever his body was mortal, yet no doubt his memory and works will live, and will in all probability last as long as the world lasteth. In order to which I have endeavoured (after my poor ability) to do this honour to his lordship, by way of conducing to the same.
Finis.