The letter to Lord Burghley did not help him much.  He received the reversion of a place, the Clerkship of the Council, which did not become vacant for twenty years.  But these years of service declined and place withheld were busy and useful ones.  What he was most intent upon, and what occupied his deepest and most serious thought, was unknown to the world round him, and probably not very intelligible to his few intimate friends, such as his brother Antony and Dr. Andrewes.  Meanwhile he placed his pen at the disposal of the authorities, and though they regarded him more as a man of study than of practice and experience, they were glad to make use of it.  His versatile genius found another employment.  Besides his affluence in topics, he had the liveliest fancy and most active imagination.  But that he wanted the sense of poetic fitness and melody, he might almost be supposed, with his reach and play of thought, to have been capable, as is maintained in some eccentric modern theories, of writing Shakespeare’s plays.  No man ever had a more imaginative power of illustration drawn from the most remote and most unlikely analogies; analogies often of the quaintest and most unexpected kind, but often also not only felicitous in application but profound and true.  His powers were early called upon for some of those sportive compositions in which that age delighted on occasions of rejoicing or festival.  Three of his contributions to these “devices” have been preserved—­two of them composed in honour of the Queen, as “triumphs,” offered by Lord Essex, one probably in 1592 and another in 1595; a third for a Gray’s Inn revel in 1594.  The “devices” themselves were of the common type of the time, extravagant, odd, full of awkward allegory and absurd flattery, and running to a prolixity which must make modern lovers of amusement wonder at the patience of those days; but the “discourses” furnished by Bacon are full of fine observation and brilliant thought and wit and happy illustration, which, fantastic as the general conception is, raises them far above the level of such fugitive trifles.

Among the fragmentary papers belonging to this time which have come down, not the least curious are those which throw light on his manner of working.  While he was following out the great ideas which were to be the basis of his philosophy, he was as busy and as painstaking in fashioning the instruments by which they were to be expressed; and in these papers we have the records and specimens of this preparation.  He was a great collector of sentences, proverbs, quotations, sayings, illustrations, anecdotes, and he seems to have read sometimes simply to gather phrases and apt words.  He jots down at random any good and pointed remark which comes into his thought or his memory; at another time he groups a set of stock quotations with a special drift, bearing on some subject, such as the faults of universities or the habits of lawyers.  Nothing is too minute for his notice.  He brings