told you in terminis terminantibus that the Marquis desires you should gratify the Treasurer.  I know that way the hare runs, and that my Lord Marquis longs until Cranfield hath it; and so I wish too, for your good; yet would not it were absolutely passed until my Lord Marquis did send or write unto you to let him have it; for then his so disposing of it were but the next degree removed from the immediate acceptance of it, and your Lordship freed from doing it otherwise than to please him, and to comply with his own will and way.”

It need hardly be said that when Cranfield got it, it soon passed into Buckingham’s hands.  “Bacon consented to part with his house, and Buckingham in return consented to give him his liberty.”  Yet Bacon could write to him, “low as I am, I had rather sojourn in a college in Cambridge than recover a good fortune by any other but yourself.”  “As for York House,” he bids Toby Matthews to let Buckingham know, “that whether in a straight line or a compass line, I meant it for his Lordship, in the way which I thought might please him best.”  But liberty did not mean either money or recovered honour.  All his life long he had made light of being in debt; but since his fall this was no longer a condition easy to bear.  He had to beg some kind of pension of the King.  He had to beg of Buckingham; “a small matter for my debts would do me more good now than double a twelvemonth hence.  I have lost six thousand by the year, besides caps and courtesies.  Two things I may assure your Lordship.  The one, that I shall lead such a course of life as whatsoever the King doth for me shall rather sort to his Majesty’s and your Lordship’s honour than to envy; the other, that whatsoever men talk, I can play the good husband, and the King’s bounty shall not be lost.”

It might be supposed from the tone of these applications that Bacon’s mind was bowed down and crushed by the extremity of his misfortune.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  In his behaviour during his accusation there was little trace of that high spirit and fortitude shown by far inferior men under like disasters.  But the moment the tremendous strain of his misfortunes was taken off, the vigour of his mind recovered itself.  The buoyancy of his hopefulness, the elasticity of his energy, are as remarkable as his profound depression.  When the end was approaching, his thoughts turned at once to other work to be done, ready in plan, ready to be taken up and finished.  At the close of his last desperate letter to the King he cannot resist finishing at once with a jest, and with the prospect of two great literary undertakings—­