When he wrote this he had already shown what his unquelled energy could accomplish.  In the summer and autumn after his condemnation, amid all the worries and inconveniences of that time, moving about from place to place, without his books, and without free access to papers and records, he had written his History of Henry VII.  The theme had, no doubt, been long in his head.  But the book was the first attempt at philosophical history in the language, and it at once takes rank with all that the world had yet seen, in classical times and more recently in Italy, of such history.  He sent the book, among other persons, to the Queen of Bohemia, with a phrase, the translation of a trite Latin commonplace, which may have been the parent of one which became famous in our time; and with an expression of absolute confidence in the goodness of his own work.

“I have read in books that it is accounted a great bliss for a man to have Leisure with Honour.  That was never my fortune.  For time was, I had Honour without Leisure; and now I have Leisure without Honour....  But my desire is now to have Leisure without Loitering, and not to become an abbey-lubber, as the old proverb was, but to yield some fruit of my private life....  If King Henry were alive again, I hope verily he would not be so angry with me for not flattering him, as well pleased in seeing himself so truly described in colours that will last and be believed.”

But the tide had turned against him for good.  A few fair words, a few grudging doles of money to relieve his pressing wants, and those sometimes intercepted and perhaps never rightly granted from an Exchequer which even Cranfield’s finance could not keep filled, were all the graces that descended upon him from those fountains of goodness in which he professed to trust with such boundless faith.  The King did not want him, perhaps did not trust him, perhaps did not really like him.  When the Novum Organum came out, all that he had to say about it was in the shape of a profane jest that “it was like the peace of God—­it passed all understanding.”  Other men had the ear of Buckingham; shrewd, practical men of business like Cranfield, who hated Bacon’s loose and careless ways, or the clever ecclesiastic Williams, whose counsel had steered Buckingham safely through the tempest that wrecked Bacon, and who, with no legal training, had been placed in Bacon’s seat.  “I thought,” said Bacon, “that I should have known my successor.”  Williams, for his part, charged Bacon with trying to cheat his creditors, when his fine was remitted.  With no open quarrel, Bacon’s relations to Buckingham became more ceremonious and guarded; the “My singular good Lord” of the former letters becomes, now that Buckingham had risen so high and Bacon had sunk so low, “Excellent Lord.”  The one friend to whom Bacon had once wished to owe everything had become the great man, now only to be approached