working. What course he betook himself to
at the crisis at which we have now arrived, I cannot possibly say." We
have here the time, the opportunity, the incentive, and the necessity
for the composition of the Shakespeare plays; part of the fruits of the
representation of which made Shakespeare very wealthy.

In January, 1597, the first acknowledged work of Bacon--his
"Essays"--was published. They were ten in number. Bacon said of them he
hoped they would be "like the late new half-pence, which, though the
pieces are small, the silver is good."

Until he was forty-four years of age, Bacon was kept poor and out of
office by his uncle Burleigh, and his cousin Cecil; during the life-time
of Queen Elizabeth he was steadily passed over and suppressed; and even
during the first years of the reign of King James I., the influence of
Cecil, then the Earl of Salisbury, was sufficient to keep him out of
office. In 1605, Bacon published his first great philosophical work,
"The Advancement of Learning;" in 1607, he became Solicitor-General; and
in 1612, Attorney-General, and member of the Privy Council. He was then
fifty-one years of age, and Shakespeare forty-eight. After the
appointment of Bacon as Attorney-General, no more of the Shakespeare
plays appeared; the "Tempest," which is evidently the last of the
series, for in it Prospero declares--

"I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I'll drown my book;"

is set down by the commentators, as written between 1609 and 1611. At
that time Shakespeare was forty-five or forty-seven years of age, and
lived for five or seven years thereafter in utter intellectual idleness,
in Stratford.

In 1609 Bacon published "The Wisdom of the Ancients," a prose work of
great poetical beauty. His professional practice was large and his
income princely. In 1617 he succeeded Ellesmere, the Lord Chancellor,
with the title of lord-keeper. In January, 1618, he was created lord
high chancellor, and the same year was raised to the peerage as Baron of
Verulam; and in 1621 he was made Viscount St. Albans. The "Novum
Organum," his great life-work, was printed in October, 1620. His
extraordinary industry is revealed in the fact that it had been copied
and revised twelve times before it took its present shape. The new
philosophy meant the study of nature and the acquisition of the
knowledge of things. In this search the "m