is first up to call others to church.”  But the two friends whose judgment he chiefly valued, and who, as on other occasions, were taken into his most intimate literary confidence, were Bishop Andrewes, his “inquisitor,” and Toby Matthews, a son of the Archbishop of York, who had become a Roman Catholic, and lived in Italy, seeing a good deal of learned men there, apparently the most trusted of all Bacon’s friends.

When Parliament met again in November, 1605, the Gunpowder Plot and its consequences filled all minds.  Bacon was not employed about it by Government, and his work in the House was confined to carrying on matters left unfinished from the previous session.  On the rumour of legal promotions and vacancies Bacon once more applied to Salisbury for the Solicitorship (March, 1606).  But no changes were made, and Bacon was “still next the door.”  In May, 1606, he did what had for some time been in his thoughts:  he married; not the lady whom Essex had tried to win for him, that Lady Hatton who became the wife of his rival Coke, but one whom Salisbury helped him to gain, an alderman’s daughter, Alice Barnham, “an handsome maiden,” with some money and a disagreeable mother, by her second marriage, Lady Packington.  Bacon’s curious love of pomp amused the gossips of the day.  “Sir Francis Bacon,” writes Carleton to Chamberlain, “was married yesterday to his young wench, in Maribone Chapel.  He was clad from top to toe in purple, and hath made himself and his wife such store of raiments of cloth of silver and gold that it draws deep into her portion.”  Of his married life we hear next to nothing:  in his Essay on Marriage he is not enthusiastic in its praise; almost the only thing we know is that in his will, twenty years afterwards, he showed his dissatisfaction with his wife, who after his death married again.  But it gave him an additional reason, and an additional plea, for pressing for preferment, and in the summer of 1606 the opening came.  Coke was made Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas, leaving the Attorney’s place vacant.  A favourite of Salisbury’s, Hobart, became Attorney, and Bacon hoped for some arrangement by which the Solicitor Doddridge might be otherwise provided for, and he himself become Solicitor.  Hopeful as he was, and patient of disappointments, and of what other men would have thought injustice and faithlessness, he felt keenly both the disgrace and the inconvenience of so often expecting place, and being so often passed over.  While the question was pending, he wrote to the King, the Chancellor, and Salisbury.  His letter to the King is a record in his own words of his public services.  To the Chancellor, whom he believed to be his supporter, he represented the discredit which he suffered—­he was a common gaze and a speech;” “the little reputation which by his industry he gathered, being scattered and taken away by continual disgraces, every new man coming above me;” and his wife and his wife’s friends were making him feel it.  The letters show what Bacon thought to be his claims, and how hard he found it to get them recognised.  To the Chancellor he urged, among other things, that time was slipping by—­