am sure there is no man that will deny him, or account otherwise of him, but to have him been a deep philosopher. And not only so; but he was able to render a reason of the hope which was in him, which that writing of his of the Confession of the Faith doth abundantly testify. He repaired frequently, when his health would permit him, to the service of the church, to hear sermons, to the administration of the sacrament of the blessed body and blood of Christ; and died in the true faith, established in the church of England. This is most true he was free from malice, which (as he said himself) he never bred nor fed. He was no revenger of injuries; which if he had minded, he had both opportunity and place high enough to have done it. He was no heaver of men out of their places, as delighting in their ruin and undoing. He was no defamer of any man to his prince. One day, when a great statesman was newly dead, that had not been his friend, the king asked him, What he thought of that lord which was gone? he answered, That he would never have made His Majesty's estate better, but he was sure

1 "He said he had breeding swans and feeding swans; but for malice, he neither bred it nor fed it." From a commonplace book of Dr. Rawley's in the Lambeth Library. "Et posso dir," says Sir Tobie Matthew, in his dedication to Cosmo de' Medici of an Italian translation of the Essays and Sapientia Veterum, 1618, "et posso dir con verità (per haver io havute l'honore di pratticarlo molti anni, et quando era in minoribus, et hora quando sta in colmo et fiore della sua grandezza) di non haver mai scoperto in lui animo di vendetta, per qualsivoglia aggravio che se gli fosse fatto; nè manco sentito uscirgli di bocca parola d' ingiuria contra veruno, che mi paresse venire da passione contra la tal persona; ma solo (et questo ancora molto scarsamente) per giudicio fattone in sangue freddo. Non è già la sua grandezza quel che io ammiro, ma la sua virtù; non sono li favori fattimi da lui (per infiniti che siano) che mi hanno posto il cuore in questi ceppi et catene in che mi ritrovo; ma si bene il suo procedere in commune; che se egli fosse di conditione inferiore, non potrei manco honorarlo, e se mi fosse nemico io dovrei con tutto ciò amar et procurar di servirlo."

he would have kept it from being worse; which was the worst he would say of him: which I reckon not among his moral, but his Christian virtues.

His fame is greater and sounds louder in foreign parts abroad, than at home in his own nation; thereby verifying that divine sentence, A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house. Concerning which I will give you a taste only, out of a letter written from Italy (the storehouse of refined wits) to the late Earl of Devonshire, then the Lord. Candish: I will expect the new essays of my Lord Chancellor Bacon, as also his History, with a great deal of desire, and whatsoever else he shall compose: but in particular of his History I promise myself a thing perfect and singular, especially in Henry the Seventh, where he may exercise the talent of his divine understanding. This lord is more and more known, and his books here more and more delighted in; and those men that have more than ordinary knowledge in human affairs, esteem him one of the most capable spirits of this age; and he is truly such. Now his fame doth not decrease with days since, but rather increase. Divers of his works have been anciently and yet lately translated into other tongues, both learned and modern, by foreign pens. Several persons of quality, during his lordship's life, crossed the seas on purpose to gain an opportunity of seeing him and discoursing with him; whereof one carried his lordship's picture from head to foot1 over with him into France, as a thing which he foresaw would be much desired there, that so they might enjoy the image of his person as well as the images of his brain, his books. Amongst the rest, Marquis

1 This picture was presented to him by Bacon himself, according to the Latin version.

Fiat, a French nobleman, who came ambassador into England, in the beginning of Queen Mary, wife to King Charles, was taken with an extraordinary desire of seeing him; for which he made way by a friend; and when he came to him, being then through weakness confined to his bed, the marquis saluted him with this high expression, That his lordship had been ever to him like the angels; of whom he had often heard, and read much of them in books, but he never saw them. After which they contracted an intimate acquaintance, and the marquis did so much revere him, that besides his frequent visits, they wrote letters one to the other, under the titles and appellations of father and son. As for his many salutations by letters from foreign worthies devoted to learning, I forbear to mention them, because that is a thing common to other men of learning or note, together with him.

But yet, in this matter of his fame, I speak in the comparative only, and not in the exclusive. For his reputation is great in his own nation also, especially amongst those that are of a more acute and sharper judgment; which I will exemplify but with two testimonies and no more. The former, when his History of King Henry the Seventh was to come forth, it was delivered to the old Lord Brook, to be perused by him; who, when he had dispatched it, returned it to the author with this eulogy, Commend me to my lord, and bid him take care to get good paper and ink, for the work is incomparable. The other shall be that of Doctor Samuel Collins, late provost of King's College in Cambridge, a man of no vulgar wit, who affirmed unto me, That when he had read the book of the

1 In the Latin version Rawley has thought worth while to add that this may have been said p'ayfully: Sive festive sive serio.

Advancement of Learning, he found himself in a case to begin his studies anew, and that he had lost all the time of his studying before.

It hath been desired, that something should be signified touching his diet, and the regimen of his health, of which, in regard of his universal insight into nature, he may perhaps be to some an example. For his diet, it was rather a plentiful and liberal diet, as his stomach would bear it, than a restrained; which he also commended in his book of the History of Life and Death. In his younger years he was much given to the finer and lighter sort of meats, as of fowls, and such like; but afterward, when he grew more judicious,1 he preferred the stronger meats, such as the shambles afforded, as those meats which bred the more firm and substantial juices of the body, and less dissipable; upon which he would often make his meal, though he had other meats upon the table. You may be sure he would not neglect that himself, which he so much extolled in his writings, and that was the use of nitre ; whereof he took in the quantity of about three grains in thin warm broth every morning, for thirty years together next before his death. And for physic, he did indeed live physically, but not miserably; for he took only a maceration of rhubarb,2 infused into a draught of white wine and beer mingled together for the space of half an hour, once in six or seven days, immediately before his meal (whether dinner or supper), that it might dry the body less; which (as he said) did carry away frequently the grosser humours

1 More judicious (that is) by experience and observation: experientiâ edoctus is the expression in the Latin version.

2 In the Latin version Rawley gives the quantity: Rhabarbari sesquidrachmam.

of the body, and not diminish or carry away any of the spirits, as sweating doth. And this was no grievous thing to take. As for other physic, in an ordinary way (whatsoever hath been vulgarly spoken) he took not. His receipt for the gout, which did constantly ease him of his pain within two hours, is already set down in the end of the Natural History.

It may seem the moon had some principal place in the figure of his nativity for the moon was never in her passion, or eclipsed, but he was surprised with a sudden fit of fainting; and that, though he observed not nor took any previous knowledge of the eclipse thereof; and as soon as the eclipse ceased, he was restored to his former strength again.

He died on the ninth day of April in the

year 1626,

1 Lord Campbell (who appears to have read Rawley's memoir only in the Latin, where the words are quoties luna defecit sive eclipsin passa est), supposing defecit to mean waned, discredits this statement, on the ground that "no instance is recorded of Bacon's having fainted in public, or put off the hearing of any cause on account of the change of the moon, or of any approaching eclipse, visible or invisible." And it is true that if defectus luna meant a change of the moon, or even a dark moon (which it might have meant well enough if the Romans had not chosen to appropriate the word to quite another meaning), the accident must have happened in public too often to pass unnoticed. But Rawley was too good a scholar to misapply so common a word in that way. He evidently speaks of eclipses only, and of eclipses visible at the place. Now it is not at all likely that lunar eclipses visible at Westminster would have coincided with important business in which Bacon was conspicuously engaged, often enough (even if he did faint every time) to establish a connexion between the two phenomena. Of course Rawley's statement is not sufficient to prove the reality of any such connexion; but there is no reason to suppose it an invention, and the fact of the fainting-fits may be fairly taken, I think, as evidence of the extreme delicacy of Bacon's temperament, and its sensibility to the skiey influences. That Bacon himself never alluded to this relation between himself and the moon is easily accounted for by supposing that he was not satisfied of the fact. He may have observed the coincidence, and mentioned it to Rawley; and Rawley (whose commonplace book proves that he had a taste for astrology) may have believed in the physical connexion, though Bacon himself did not.