work had been begun, if not entirely completed, in that year. Somewhere between 1623 and 1626, his sentence is fully pardoned; and Coke, Cranfield, Williams, and others, disciples of the Cokean doctrine of the chief end of man, who had been instrumental in pulling Bacon down, now fall themselves, some with Coke himself into the Tower, and some into the lowest deeps. Bacon continues his labors at Gray's Inn (when not too sick to work) upon the "Great Instauration," the "Apothegms," the "Holy War," the "Natural History," the "New Atlantis," the Essays, and the Psalms, with the assistance, at times, of Meautys, Matthew, Rawley, Hobbes, Ben Jonson, and George Herbert; for poets and philosophers and divines alike appear to have had a singular admiration and affection for this "Chancellor of Parnassus," of whom Ben Jonson never repented of having written these lines, nor ever recanted a word or syllable of them, characterizing him as "England's high Chancellor, the destined heir, Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full A new edition of the Essays, with twenty new ones added, and among them (as it may be well to note) the Essay of the "Vicissitude of Things," is printed in 1625; the Metrical Versions of the Psalms of David" are dedicated to George Herbert, "as the best judge of Divinity and Poesy met;" and he dies on the 9th of April, 1626, saying in his will: "For my name and memory I leave it to men's charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages." There was less occasion, perhaps, than has been generally supposed, that he should leave it by his will either to the one or to the other; for his own contemporaries were not wholly blind to his superiority, whether in the powers of the intellect or of the imagination, in the extent of his learning or in the nobility of his nature and character, in the splendor of his genius or in the greatness of his works. Though no account remains to tell us what unusual state attended his funeral, we know that his faithful secretary, Thomas Meautys, who erected a fitting monument over him in St. Michael's Church, near St. Albans, where he was buried by the side of his mother (as he had himself desired) "within the walls of Old Verulam," whereon he inscribed him the Light of Science and the Law of Eloquence, whom he had worshipped living, and admired when dead, was by no means the only one to cast a flower upon his grave. Numerous tributes to his memory immediately appeared. Some of them have been preserved in the Harleian Miscellanies, elegantly written in Latin, and though for the most part anonymous, evidently by men of learning and genius, who knew how to appreciate his worth even as a son of Apollo, as witness these few lines of extract: "Constat, Aprile uno te potuisse mori: GEORGIUS HERBERT." "Crudelis nunquam vére prius Atropos: orbem Hei mihi! nec cœlum, nec mors, nec musa (Bacone) "Ah nunquam vére infœlix prius ipsus Apollo! Ah numerum non est habitum; jamque necesse est, Marmore Pieridum gelido Phœbique choragum Fallere: jam rutilo Verulamia fulget Olympo: Sidere splendet aper magne Jacobi tuo.1 1 Harl. Misc., X. 288-295. We know when Bacon's acknowledged works were pub lished, and also in what years many of them were chiefly written; but some of them occupied his mind more or less during many years or nearly all his life, and materials were always accumulating on his hands; and some of them were composed in whole or in part long before they were printed. But most of these plays were no doubt produced on the stage very soon after they were written; and, although it may not be possible to fix with precision the exact dates at which they were composed, in all cases, the facts known concerning them enable us to assign a hither limit to their appearance with positive certainty in nearly every instance; and this will be sufficient for the purpose in hand. The researches of later critics have considerably modified the chronological order of Malone and older writers, and they furnish data on which a near approximation to the date of composition, in the majority of instances, can be attained. On these and such other lights as we have, the following order, with the nearest dates, may be accepted, perhaps, as a very close approach to the truth. Thus it appears that the period of time in which these plays and poems were produced corresponds exactly to that portion of Bacon's life in which we may most easily sup 1 First printed in the present form: an older form printed in 1594. 2 First in complete form: only first sketches before. 8 First in complete form: only a sketch before. pose they could have been written by him, being the period of thirty-one years between his coming to the bar, in 1582, and his elevation to the principal law-office of the crown, in 1613, and between the ages of twenty-one and fifty-two. During the first twenty-five years of this time, and until made Solicitor-General, in 1607, he was looking in vain for advancement in the state, getting none beyond a seat in Parliament, which came from the people, and the small employment of a Queen's (or King's) Counsel, both places of honor rather than profit; and was a barrister, a close student, and a bachelor at his lodgings in Gray's Inn, with distressingly little professional business and much leisure for writing and for study, spending his vacations in the quiet retreats of Gorhambury and Twickenham Park; a constant attendant upon the Court, a friend and counsellor of the favorite Essex, and an intimate associate of his gay young compeers, Southampton, Rutland, Pembroke, and Montgomery, who were constant visitors of the theatre, some of them great patrons of learning, and themselves amateurs in poetry, and all of them patrons and lovers of the liberal arts. All the while, Francis Bacon was intent upon his legal studies, his parliamentary duties, his scientific inquiries, his civil and moral Essays, his "Wisdom of the Ancients," his "Advancement of Learning," and those philosophical speculations and instaurations which were his "graver studies," together with sundry unnamed "recreations" of his other studies; being thus, at the same time, engaged in writing various works in prose (if not in verse also) on subjects which, in a general view, and in their main matter and scope, are found to be essentially kindred and parallel with these very plays. In his dedication of the "Dialogue Touching a Holy War" (itself not without some touch of the Shakespearean faculty), addressed to the learned Bishop Andrews, in 1622, he tells us that these smaller works, such as the Essays, and "some other particulars of that nature," |