energy, the profound conviction, the eloquence of Bacon which first
called the attention of mankind as a whole to the power and importance
of physical research. It was he who by his lofty faith in the results
and victories of the new philosophy nerved its followers to a zeal and
confidence equal to his own. It was he above all who gave dignity to the
slow and patient processes of investigation, of experiment, of
comparison, to the sacrifice of hypothesis to fact, to the single aim
after truth, which was to be the law of modern science.

[Sidenote: Advance of the Parliament.]

While England thus became "a nest of singing birds," while Bacon was
raising the lofty fabric of his philosophical speculation, the people
itself was waking to a new sense of national freedom. Elizabeth saw the
forces, political and religious, which she had stubbornly held in check
for half a century pressing on her irresistibly. In spite of the rarity
of its assemblings, in spite of high words and imprisonment and
dexterous management, the Parliament had quietly gained a power which,
at her accession, the Queen could never have dreamed of its possessing.
Step by step the Lower House had won the freedom of its members from
arrest save by its own permission, the right of punishing and expelling
members for crimes committed within its walls, and of determining all
matters relating to elections. The more important claim of freedom of
speech had brought on from time to time a series of petty conflicts in
which Elizabeth generally gave way. But on this point the Commons still
shrank from any consistent repudiation of the Queen's assumption of
control. A bold protest of Peter Wentworth against her claim to exercise
such a control in 1575 was met indeed by the House itself with his
committal to the Tower; and the bolder questions which he addressed to
the Parliament of 1588, "Whether this Council is not a place for every
member of the same freely and without control, by bill or speech, to
utter any of the griefs of the Commonwealth," brought on him a fresh
imprisonment at the hands of the Council, which lasted till the
dissolution of the Parliament and with which the Commons declined to
interfere. But while vacillating in its assertion of the rights of
individual members, the House steadily claimed for itself a right to
discuss even the highest matters of State. Three great subjects, the
succession, the Church, and the regulation of trade, had been regar