for a place to command wits and pens;” he has his eye on rich and childless bishops, on the enforced idleness of State prisoners in the Tower, like Northumberland and Raleigh, on the great schools and universities, where he might perhaps get hold of some college for “Inventors”—­as we should say, for the endowment of research.  These matters fill up a large space of his notes.  But his thoughts were also busy about his own advancement.  And to these sheets of miscellaneous memoranda Bacon confided not only his occupations and his philosophical and political ideas, but, with a curious innocent unreserve, the arts and methods which he proposed to use in order to win the favour of the great and to pull down the reputation of his rivals.  He puts down in detail how he is to recommend himself to the King and the King’s favourites—­

“To set on foot and maintain access with his Majesty, Dean of the Chapel, May, Murray.  Keeping a course of access at the beginning of every term and vacation, with a memorial.  To attend some time his repasts, or to fall into a course of familiar discourse.  To find means to win a conceit, not open, but private, of being affectionate and assured to the Scotch, and fit to succeed Salisbury in his manage in that kind; Lord Dunbar, Duke of Lennox, and Daubiny:  secret.”

Then, again, of Salisbury—­

“Insinuate myself to become privy to my Lord of Salisbury’s estate.”  “To correspond with Salisbury in a habit of natural but no ways perilous boldness, and in vivacity, invention, care to cast and enterprise (but with due caution), for this manner I judge both in his nature freeth the stands, and in his ends pleaseth him best, and promiseth more use of me.  I judge my standing out, and not favoured by Northampton, must needs do me good with Salisbury, especially comparative to the Attorney.”

The Attorney Hobart filled the place to which Bacon had so long aspired, and which he thought, perhaps reasonably, that he could fill much better.  At any rate, one of the points to which he recurs frequently in his notes is to exhort himself to make his own service a continual contrast to the Attorney’s—­“to have in mind and use the Attorney’s weakness,” enumerating a list of instances:  “Too full of cases and distinctions.  Nibbling solemnly, he distinguisheth but apprehends not;” “No gift with his pen in proclamations and the like;” and at last he draws out in a series of epigrams his view of “Hubbard’s disadvantages”—­

“Better at shift than at drift.... Subtilitas sine acrimonia....  No power with the judge....  He will alter a thing but not mend....  He puts into patents and deeds words not of law but of common sense and discourse....  Sociable save in profit....  He doth depopulate mine office; otherwise called inclose....  I never knew any one of so good a speech with a worse pen.” ...

Then in a marginal note—­“Solemn goose.