range
secrets behind him, which showed his unsuspected hostility to Bacon?
Except on this supposition (but there is nothing to support it), no
exaggeration of the liberty allowed to the language of compliment is
enough to clear Bacon of an insincerity which is almost inconceivable in
any but the meanest tools of power.

"I assure myself," wrote Bacon to the King, "your Majesty taketh not me
for one of a busy nature; for my estate being free from all
difficulties, and I having such a large field for contemplation, as I
have partly and shall much more make manifest unto your Majesty and the
world, to occupy my thoughts, nothing could make me active but love and
affection." So Bacon described his position with questionable
accuracy--for his estate was not "free from difficulties"--in the new
time coming. He was still kept out of the inner circle of the Council;
but from the moment of Salisbury's death he became a much more important
person. He still sued for advancement, and still met with
disappointment; the "mean men" still rose above him. The lucrative place
of Master of the Wards was vacated by Salisbury's death. Bacon was
talked of for it, and probably expected it, for he drew up new rules for
it, and a speech for the new master; but the office and the speech went
to Sir George Carey. Soon after Sir George Carey died. Bacon then
applied for it through the new favourite, Rochester. "He was so
confident of the place that he put most of his men into new cloaks;" and
the world of the day amused itself at his disappointment, when the place
was given to another "mean man," Sir Walter Cope, of whom the gossips
wrote that if the "last two Treasurers could look out of their graves to
see those successors in that place, they would be out of countenance
with themselves, and say to the world _quantum mutatus_." But Bacon's
hand and counsel appear more and more in important matters--the
improvement of the revenue; the defence of extreme rights of the
prerogative in the case against Whitelocke; the great question of
calling a parliament, and of the true and "princely" way of dealing with
it. His confidential advice to the King about calling a parliament was
marked by his keen perception of the facts of the situation; it was
marked too by his confident reliance on skilful indirect methods and
trust in the look of things; it bears traces also of his bitter feeling
against Salisbury, whom he charges with treacherously fomenting the
o