on the whole, or was unpatriotic, or immoral in his private life, or mean in his ordinary dealings, or more cruel and harsh in his judicial transactions than most of the public functionaries of his rough and venal age.  We admit it is difficult to controvert the charges which Macaulay arrays against him, for so accurate and painstaking an historian is not likely to be wrong in his facts; but we believe that they are uncandidly stated, and so ingeniously and sophistically put as to give on the whole a wrong impression of the man,—­making him out worse than he was, considering his age and circumstances.  Bacon’s character, like that of most great men, has two sides; and while we are compelled painfully to admit that he had many faults, we shrink from classing him among bad men, as is implied in Pope’s characterization of him as “the meanest of mankind.”

We now take leave of the man, to consider his legacy to the world.  And here again we are compelled to take issue with Macaulay, not in regard to the great fact that Bacon’s inquiries tended to a new revelation of Nature, and by means of the method called induction, by which he sought to establish fixed principles of science that could not be controverted, but in reference to the ends for which he labored.  “The aim of Bacon,” says Macaulay, “was utility,—­fruit; the multiplication of human enjoyments, ... the mitigation of human sufferings, ... the prolongation of life by new inventions,”—­dotare vitam humanum novis inventis et copiis; “the conquest of Nature,”—­dominion over the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air; the application of science to the subjection of the outward world; progress in useful arts,—­in those arts which enable us to become strong, comfortable, and rich in houses, shops, fabrics, tools, merchandise, new vegetables, fruits, and animals:  in short, a philosophy which will “not raise us above vulgar wants, but will supply those wants.”  “And as an acre in Middlesex is worth more than a principality in Utopia, so the smallest practical good is better than any magnificent effort to realize an impossibility;” and “hence the first shoemaker has rendered more substantial service to mankind than all the sages of Greece.  All they could do was to fill the world with long beards and long words; whereas Bacon’s philosophy has lengthened life, mitigated pain, extinguished disease, built bridges, guided the thunderbolts, lightened the night with the splendor of the day, accelerated motion, annihilated distance, facilitated intercourse; enabled men to descend to the depths of the earth, to traverse the land in cars which whirl without horses, and the ocean in ships which sail against the wind.”  In other words, it was his aim to stimulate mankind, not to seek unattainable truth, but useful truth; that is, the science which produces railroads, canals, cultivated farms, ships, rich returns for labor, silver and gold from the mines,—­all that purchase the joys of material life and fit us for dominion