“Remember (O Lord) how thy servant hath walked before thee; remember what I have first sought, and what hath been principal in mine intentions.  I have loved thy assemblies, I have mourned for the divisions of thy Church, I have delighted in the brightness of thy sanctuary.  This vine which thy right hand hath planted in this nation, I have ever prayed unto thee that it might have the first and the latter rain; and that it might stretch her branches to the seas and to the floods.  The state and bread of the poor and oppressed have been precious in my eyes:  I have hated all cruelty and hardness of heart; I have (though in a despised weed) procured the good of all men.  If any have been mine enemies, I thought not of them; neither hath the sun almost set upon my displeasure; but I have been as a dove, free from superfluity of maliciousness.  Thy creatures have been my books, but thy Scriptures much more.  I have sought thee in the courts, fields, and gardens, but I have found thee in thy temples.

“Thousand have been my sins, and ten thousand my transgressions; but thy sanctifications have remained with me, and my heart, through thy grace, hath been an unquenched coal upon thy altar.  O Lord, my strength, I have since my youth met with thee in all my ways, by thy fatherly compassions, by thy comfortable chastisements, and by thy most visible providence.  As thy favours have increased upon me, so have thy corrections; so as thou hast been alway near me, O Lord; and ever as my worldly blessings were exalted, so secret darts from thee have pierced me; and when I have ascended before men, I have descended in humiliation before thee.

“And now when I thought most of peace and honour, thy hand is heavy upon me, and hath humbled me, according to thy former loving-kindness, keeping me still in thy fatherly school, not as a bastard, but as a child.  Just are thy judgements upon me for my sins, which are more in number than the sands of the sea, but have no proportion to thy mercies; for what are the sands of the sea to the sea, earth, heavens? and all these are nothing to thy mercies.

“Besides my innumerable sins, I confess before thee that I am debtor to thee for the gracious talent of thy gifts and graces, which I have misspent in things for which I was least fit; so as I may truly say, my soul hath been a stranger in the course of my pilgrimage.  Be merciful unto me (O Lord) for my Saviour’s sake, and receive me into thy bosom, or guide me in thy ways.”

Bacon up to this time strangely, if the Committees were “open Courts,” was entirely ignorant of the particulars of the charge which was accumulating against him.  He had an interview with the King, which was duly reported to the House, and he placed his case before James, distinguishing between the “three cases of bribery supposed in a judge—­a corrupt bargain; carelessness in receiving a gift while the cause is going on; and, what is innocent, receiving a gift after it is ended.”  And he meant in such words as these to place himself at the King’s disposal, and ask his direction: