Even Bacon was not above publishing a new edition of his essays, "where," says Chamberlain, "in a chapter of 'Deformity' the world takes note that he paints his little cousin to the life."[1] It will be remembered that this very spiteful essay begins as follows:—
"Deformed persons are commonly even with nature; for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature; being for the most part, as the Scripture saith, 'void of natural affection'; and so they have their revenge of nature. Certainly there is a consent between the body and the mind, and where nature erreth in the one, she ventureth in the other."
When James asked Bacon for his opinion of Salisbury, he replied:—
"Your Majesty hath lost a great subject and a good servant. But if I should praise him in propriety, I should say that he was a fit man to keep things from growing worse, but no very fit man to reduce things to be much better. For he loved to have the eyes of all Israel a little too much upon himself, and to have all business still under the hammer and like clay in the hands of the potter, to mould it as he thought good, so that he was more in operatione than in opere; and though he had fine passages of action, yet the real conclusion came slowly on."[2]
At another time Bacon described him as "doing little with much formality and protestation," and (expressing the same idea in other
