con turned his attention to them. He addressed a
discourse to the King on the union of the two kingdoms, the first of a
series of discussions on the subject which Bacon made peculiarly his
own, and which, no doubt, first drew the King's attention and favour to
him.

But for the first year of James's reign he was unnoticed by the King,
and he was able to give his attention more freely to the great thought
and hope of his life. This time of neglect gave him the opportunity of
leisurely calling together and examining the ideas which had long had
hold of his mind about the state of human knowledge, about the
possibilities of extending it, about the hopes and powers which that new
knowledge opened, and about the methods of realising this great
prospect. This, the passion of his life, never asleep even in the
hottest days of business or the most hopeless days of defeat, must have
had full play during these days of suspended public employment. He was a
man who was not easily satisfied with his attempts to arrange the order
and proportions of his plans for mastering that new world of unknown
truth, which he held to be within the grasp of man if he would only dare
to seize it; and he was much given to vary the shape of his work, and to
try experiments in composition and even style. He wrote and rewrote.
Besides what was finally published, there remains a larger quantity of
work which never reached the stage of publication. He repeated over and
over again the same thoughts, the same images and characteristic
sayings. Among these papers is one which sums up his convictions about
the work before him, and the vocation to which he had been called in
respect of it. It is in the form of a "Proem" to a treatise on the
_Interpretation of Nature_. It was never used in his published works;
but, as Mr. Spedding says, it has a peculiar value as an authentic
statement of what he looked upon as his special business in life. It is
this mission which he states to himself in the following paper. It is
drawn up in "stately Latin." Mr. Spedding's translation is no unworthy
representation of the words of the great Prophet of Knowledge:

"Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and
regarding the care of the Commonwealth as a kind of common property
which, like the air and water, belongs to everybody, I set myself
to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what
service I was myself best fitted by