by the king; and about the beginning of the year 1624 he received a full pardon.
It has been generously sought to exculpate Bacon from the charges on which he was thus condemned by arguing that, after all, the presents or bribes which he was accused of receiving were really only the same thing under another name with the fees by which, instead of by salaries, most of the functionaries in our courts of law were formerly paid, and which still, indeed, make up part of the income of some of them, or very recently did. It is impossible to acquiesce in such a representation for a moment except by shutting our eyes to all the facts of the case; and it is entirely inconsistent with the view which Bacon himself took. He never attempted to stand upon his defence in this matter, as he had done in that of the prosecution of Essex. The notion of presents being the same with fees is one which he himself nowhere so much as hints at. We have his own words. In his final "humble confession and submission," he went over seriatim all the twenty-eight articles of the charge or impeachment sent up by the commons, without endeavouring to excuse himself in regard to any one of them on that ground.
"I do plainly and ingenuously confess," he began by saying, "that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence, and put myself upon the grace and mercy of your lordships;" and, in conclusion, after stating everything that he could in the way of palliation or explanation, he repeated—"I do now again confess, that, in the points charged upon me, though they should be taken as myself have declared them, there is a great deal of corruption and neglect, for which I am heartily sorry, and submit myself to the judgment, grace, and mercy of the court." "For extenuation," he added, very touchingly, "I will use none concerning the matters themselves; only it may please your lordships, out of your nobleness, to cast your eyes of compassion upon my person and estate; I was never noted for an avaricious man, and the apostle saith that covetousness is the root of all evil. I hope also that your lordships do rather find me in the state of grace, for that, in all those particulars, there are few or none that are not almost two years old; whereas those that have a habit of corruption do commonly wax worse. So that it hath pleased God to prepare me by precedent degrees of amendment to my present penitency; and, for my estate, it is so mean and poor, as my care is now chiefly to satisfy my debts." We believe this statement to give us the whole truth of the case. Bacon was careless and given to expense, and was accordingly often pinched for money, besides being probably plundered by his servants, to whom he was too indulgent; but he had nothing in him of the love of money for its own sake; nor would he be likely to have any apprehension of being biassed in his view of the suits that came before him by the presents he allowed himself to accept. He spoke, we feel sure, what he believed to be true when he denied, as he always did, that he "had ever had bribe or reward in his eye or thought when he pronounced any sentence or order." His very confidence in his intellectual invincibility may have helped to betray him. The whole case may be admitted to be correctly summed up by himself in a very remarkable note of what he had said to his friends, which Mr. Spedding found some years ago in ciphers in a common-place book of Dr. Rawley's preserved at Lambeth—"I was the justest judge that was in England these fifty years; but it was the justest censure in parliament that was these two hundred years."
He did not allow himself to be long prostrated by this terrible overthrow. Before the end of the same year in which he had been precipitated from his pride of place he had completed his "History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh." It appeared in a folio volume in 1622, and never certainly had his pen shown itself more instinct with life. Nor, this task finished, did he, amid all the embarrassment of his ruined fortunes, give himself up for a moment either to despondency or to idleness. Besides his "De Augmentis," published in 1623, two years afterwards he gave to the world a collection of "Apophthegms, New and Old," filling above three hundred pages. Several political tracts also, and various additions to what he had already written of the "Instauratio," were the product of this part of his life.
After all he survived his royal master, and saw the beginning of a third reign. King James died on the 27th of March, 1625; Bacon lived till the 9th of April, 1626. He had never had any children, and it is evident from his will that some serious disagreement had divided him from his wife in his last days. Lady Bacon, who was probably many years younger than her husband, not long after his death married her gentleman-usher, and survived till 1650.
The life of Bacon has been written briefly by his chaplain, Dr. Rawley; at greater length, but very superficially and slightly, by Mallet; much more elaborately in the Biographia Britannica, and by Dr. Birch; and, with various degrees of fullness and knowledge, more recently by Basil Montagu, Lord Macaulay, Lord Campbell, and M. Charles Remusat (Bacon, sa Vie, son Temps, sa Philosophie, Paris, 1857). The latest publication of value on the subject is Mr. William Hepworth Dixon's Personal History of Lord Bacon, from unpublished Papers, London, 1861. The great questions of the true nature and significance of the Baconian, or, as it is often styled, the inductive or experimental philosophy, of its originality, and of what part it has had in the progress of modern discovery, have been amply discussed and illustrated by John Playfair, Macvey Napier, Coleridge, Hallam, the late Comte Joseph de Maistre (in his Remarques sur la Philosophie de Bacon, Paris, 1838), Macaulay, Herschel, J. J. Mill, Whewell, Remusat, and, with very remarkable acuteness and power, by Kuno Fischer, in his Francis Bacon of Verulam; Realistic Philosophy and its Age (translated from the German by John Oxenford), London, 1857. But everything that had previously been done for Bacon, whether in the investigation of the facts of his biography, or in the full and faithful reproduction of what he has written, or in the determination of his claims as a thinker, will be superseded or thrown into the shade by the edition of his works, to include a new life, or at any rate what will be equivalent to that, as well as much other additional matter, now in course of publication under the superintendence of Mr. Spedding, of which seven large volumes, containing all the philosophical treatises, with introductions and annotations from the papers of the late lamented Mr. R. H. Ellis, all the historical and other literary compositions, and also all the professional tracts (the care of which was undertaken by Mr. Douglas Heath), have already appeared.—G. L. C.
BACON, John, a distinguished English sculptor, born at Southwark in 1740; died in 1799. Of poor but respectable parents, he was apprenticed to a manufacturer of pottery. Whilst in this employment he had occasion to see clay sketches sent by sculptors to be baked at the establishment. This kindled his decided inclination, and led him to try his skill in similar works. Unaided and in concealment, he thus produced his first essays, which obtained nine times the prize of the Art Society. This brought him into notice and opened his career. The statue of Mars completed his success, and he was received an associate at the London Academy in 1770. Presented to the king, he executed his bust with good success, and thus obtained the royal favour, which afterwards secured him the preference in the competition with Banks and Nollekens for the Pitt's monument for Westminster Abbey. This monument, and that of Lord Halifax for the same abbey, and the one of Mrs. Draper (the Eliza of Sterne) in the Bristol cathedral, are considered, with the Mars already mentioned, as his masterpieces. It was his boast, and certainly his greatest merit, that he had succeeded as a sculptor without having studied abroad. Of a blunt character, and not very kind to his rivals, he nevertheless possessed a grateful and honest heart. His conduct towards his eccentric friend Johnson, the builder and banker, when the latter was in difficulties, deserves all praise. His style was grand and bold, and in good taste. Some of his works in bronze were also particularly successful.—R. M.
BACON, Nathaniel., son of Edward, third son of the lord-keeper, Sir Nicolas, by his first wife. He was bred to the bar, and was for some years in the commission of the peace for Essex. In 1643 he was elected recorder of Ipswich, and in 1651, town-clerk. He sat as a burgess in the Long Parliament for the university of Cambridge. He was afterwards appointed a judge of the admiralty, and was finally elected a burgess for Ipswich in the parliaments of 1654, 1656, and 1658. He was also recorder of St. Edmund's Bury, and a bencher of Gray's inn. He was a zealous republican, and took an active part in the transactions of the times. He was most probably the Nathaniel Bacon who wrote "An Historical Discourse of the Uniformity of the Government of England," first published in 1647, and which has passed through several editions. Many of
