his house.  He did not write the letter as a dying man.  But disease had fastened on him.  A few days after, early on Easter morning, April 9, 1626, he passed away.  He was buried at St. Albans, in the Church of St. Michael, “the only Christian church within the walls of old Verulam.”  “For my name and memory,” he said in his will, “I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations and the next ages.”  So he died:  the brightest, richest, largest mind but one, in the age which had seen Shakespeare and his fellows; so bright and rich and large that there have been found those who identify him with the writer of Hamlet and Othello.  That is idle.  Bacon could no more have written the plays than Shakespeare could have prophesied the triumphs of natural philosophy.  So ended a career, than which no other in his time had grander and nobler aims—­aims, however mistaken, for the greatness and good of England; aims for the enlargement of knowledge and truth, and for the benefit of mankind.  So ended a career which had mounted slowly and painfully, but resolutely, to the highest pinnacle of greatness—­greatness full of honour and beneficent activity—­suddenly to plunge down to depths where honour and hope were irrecoverable.  So closed, in disgrace and disappointment and neglect, the last sad chapter of a life which had begun so brightly, which had achieved such permanent triumphs, which had lost itself so often in the tangles of insincerity and evil custom, which was disfigured and marred by great misfortunes, and still more by great mistakes of his own, which was in many ways misunderstood not only by his generation but by himself, but which he left in the constant and almost unaccountable faith that it would be understood and greatly honoured by posterity.  With all its glories, it was the greatest shipwreck, the greatest tragedy, of an age which saw many.

But in these gloomy and dreary days of depression and vain hope to which his letters bear witness—­“three years and five months old in misery,” again later, “a long cleansing week of five years’ expiation and more”—­his interest in his great undertaking and his industry never flagged.  The King did not want what he offered, did not want his histories, did not want his help about law.  Well, then, he had work of his own on which his heart was set; and if the King did not want his time, he had the more for himself.  Even in the busy days of his Chancellorship he had prepared and carried through the press the Novum Organum, which he published on the very eve of his fall.  It was one of those works which quicken a man’s powers, and prove to him what he can do; and it had its effect.  His mind was never more alert than in these years of adversity, his labour never more indefatigable, his powers of expression never more keen and versatile and strong.  Besides the political writings of grave argument for which he found time, these five years teem with the results of work.  In the year