with “sweet meats” and elaborate courtesy.  But it was no use.  His full pardon Bacon did not get, though earnestly suing for it, that he might not “die in ignominy.”  He never sat again in Parliament.  The Provostship of Eton fell vacant, and Bacon’s hopes were kindled.  “It were a pretty cell for my fortune.  The College and School I do not doubt but I shall make to flourish.”  But Buckingham had promised it to some nameless follower, and by some process of exchange it went to Sir Henry Wotton.  His English history was offered in vain.  His digest of the Laws was offered in vain.  In vain he wrote a memorandum on the regulation of usury; notes of advice to Buckingham; elaborate reports and notes of speeches about a war with Spain, when that for a while loomed before the country.  In vain he affected an interest which he could hardly have felt in the Spanish marriage, and the escapade of Buckingham and Prince Charles, which “began,” he wrote, “like a fable of the poets, but deserved all in a piece a worthy narration.”  In vain, when the Spanish marriage was off and the French was on, he proposed to offer to Buckingham “his service to live a summer as upon mine own delight at Paris, to settle a fast intelligence between France and us;” “I have somewhat of the French,” he said, “I love birds, as the King doth.”  Public patronage and public employment were at an end for him.  His petitions to the King and Buckingham ceased to be for office, but for the clearing of his name and for the means of living.  It is piteous to read the earnestness of his requests.  “Help me (dear Sovereign lord and master), pity me so far as that I who have borne a bag be not now in my age forced in effect to bear a wallet.”  The words are from a carefully-prepared and rhetorical letter which was not sent, but they express what he added to a letter presenting the De Augmentis; “det Vestra Majestas obolum Belisario.”  Again, “I prostrate myself at your Majesty’s feet; I your ancient servant, now sixty-four years old in age, and three years and five months old in misery.  I desire not from your Majesty means, nor place, nor employment, but only after so long a time of expiation, a complete and total remission of the sentence of the Upper House, to the end that blot of ignominy may be removed from me, and from my memory and posterity, that I die not a condemned man, but may be to your Majesty, as I am to God, nova creatura.”  But the pardon never came.  Sir John Bennett, who had been condemned as a corrupt judge by the same Parliament, and between whose case and Bacon’s there was as much difference, “I will not say as between black and white, but as between black and gray,” had got his full pardon, “and they say shall sit in Parliament.”  Lord Suffolk had been one of Bacon’s judges.  “I hope I deserve not to be the only outcast.”  But whether the Court did not care, or whether, as he once suspected, there was some old enemy like Coke, who “had a tooth against him,” and was watching any favour shown him, he died without his wish being fulfilled, “to live out of want and to die out of ignominy.”