But for the first year of James’s reign he was unnoticed by the King, and he was able to give his attention more freely to the great thought and hope of his life.  This time of neglect gave him the opportunity of leisurely calling together and examining the ideas which had long had hold of his mind about the state of human knowledge, about the possibilities of extending it, about the hopes and powers which that new knowledge opened, and about the methods of realising this great prospect.  This, the passion of his life, never asleep even in the hottest days of business or the most hopeless days of defeat, must have had full play during these days of suspended public employment.  He was a man who was not easily satisfied with his attempts to arrange the order and proportions of his plans for mastering that new world of unknown truth, which he held to be within the grasp of man if he would only dare to seize it; and he was much given to vary the shape of his work, and to try experiments in composition and even style.  He wrote and rewrote.  Besides what was finally published, there remains a larger quantity of work which never reached the stage of publication.  He repeated over and over again the same thoughts, the same images and characteristic sayings.  Among these papers is one which sums up his convictions about the work before him, and the vocation to which he had been called in respect of it.  It is in the form of a “Proem” to a treatise on the Interpretation of Nature.  It was never used in his published works; but, as Mr. Spedding says, it has a peculiar value as an authentic statement of what he looked upon as his special business in life.  It is this mission which he states to himself in the following paper.  It is drawn up in “stately Latin.”  Mr. Spedding’s translation is no unworthy representation of the words of the great Prophet of Knowledge: 

“Believing that I was born for the service of mankind, and regarding the care of the Commonwealth as a kind of common property which, like the air and water, belongs to everybody, I set myself to consider in what way mankind might be best served, and what service I was myself best fitted by nature to perform.

“Now among all the benefits that could be conferred upon mankind, I found none so great as the discovery of new arts, endowments, and commodities for the bettering of man’s life....  But if a man could succeed, not in striking out some particular invention, however useful, but in kindling a light in nature—­a light that should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge; and so spreading further and further should presently disclose and bring into sight all that is most hidden and secret in the world—­that man (I thought) would be the benefactor indeed of the human race—­the propagator of man’s empire over the universe, the champion of liberty, the conqueror and subduer