r a man of
honourable mind; but a cool-judging and prudent man may well have acted
as he represents himself acting without forgetting what he owed to his
friend. Till the last great moment of trial there is a good deal to be
said for Bacon: a man keenly alive to Essex's faults, with a strong
sense of what he owed to the Queen and the State, and with his own
reasonable chances of rising greatly prejudiced by Essex's folly. But at
length came the crisis which showed the man, and threw light on all that
had passed before, when he was picked out, out of his regular place, to
be charged with the task of bringing home the capital charge against
Essex. He does not say he hesitated. He does not say that he asked to be
excused the terrible office. He did not flinch as the minister of
vengeance for those who required that Essex should die. He did his work,
we are told by his admiring biographer, better than Coke, and repaired
the blunders of the prosecution. He passes over very shortly this part
of the business: "It was laid upon me with the rest of my fellows;" yet
it is the knot and key of the whole, as far as his own character is
concerned. Bacon had his public duty: his public duty may have compelled
him to stand apart from Essex. But it was his interest, it was no part
of his public duty, which required him to accept the task of accuser of
his friend, and in his friend's direst need calmly to drive home a
well-directed stroke that should extinguish chances and hopes, and make
his ruin certain. No one who reads his anxious letters about preferment
and the Queen's favour, about his disappointed hopes, about his
straitened means and distress for money, about his difficulties with his
creditors--he was twice arrested for debt--can doubt that the question
was between his own prospects and his friend; and that to his own
interest he sacrificed his friend and his own honour.

CHAPTER III.

BACON AND JAMES I.

Bacon's life was a double one. There was the life of high thinking, of
disinterested aims, of genuine enthusiasm, of genuine desire to delight
and benefit mankind, by opening new paths to wonder and knowledge and
power. And there was the put on and worldly life, the life of supposed
necessities for the provision of daily bread, the life of ambition and
self-seeking, which he followed, not without interest and satisfaction,
but at bottom because he thought he must--must be a great man, must be
rich, must live in the