“This is my last suit which I shall make to your Majesty in this business, prostrating myself at your mercy seat, after fifteen years service, wherein I have served your Majesty in my poor endeavours with an entire heart, and, as I presumed to say unto your Majesty, am still a virgin for matters that concern your person and crown; and now only craving that after eight steps of honour I be not precipitated altogether.  But because he that hath taken bribes is apt to give bribes, I will go furder, and present your Majesty with a bribe.  For if your Majesty will give me peace and leisure, and God give me life, I will present your Majesty with a good history of England, and a better digest of your laws.”

The Tower did, indeed, to use a word of the time, “mate” him.  But the moment he was out of it, his quick and fertile mind was immediately at work in all directions, reaching after all kinds of plans, making proof of all kinds of expedients to retrieve the past, arranging all kinds of work according as events might point out the way.  His projects for history, for law, for philosophy, for letters, occupy quite as much of his thoughts as his pardon and his debts; and they, we have seen, occupied a good deal.  If he was pusillanimous in the moment of the storm, his spirit, his force, his varied interests, returned the moment the storm was past.  His self-reliance, which was boundless, revived.  He never allowed himself to think, however men of his own time might judge him, that the future world would mistake him. “Aliquis fui inter vivos,” he writes to Gondomar, “neque omnino intermoriar apud posteros.”  Even in his time he did not give up the hope of being restored to honour and power.  He compared himself to Demosthenes, to Cicero, to Seneca, to Marcus Livius, who had been condemned for corrupt dealings as he had been, and had all recovered favour and position.  Lookers-on were puzzled and shocked.  “He has,” writes Chamberlain, “no manner of feeling of his fall, but continuing vain and idle in all his humours as when he was at the highest.”  “I am said,” Bacon himself writes, “to have a feather in my head.”

Men were mistaken.  His thoughts were, for the moment, more than ever turned to the future; but he had not given up hope of having a good deal to say yet to the affairs of the present.  Strangely enough, as it seems to us, in the very summer after that fatal spring of 1621 the King called for his opinion concerning the reformation of Courts of Justice; and Bacon, just sentenced for corruption and still unpardoned, proceeds to give his advice as if he were a Privy Councillor in confidential employment.  Early in the following year he, according to his fashion, surveyed his position, and drew up a paper of memoranda, like the notes of the Commentarius Solutus of 1608, about points to be urged to the King at an interview.  Why should not the King employ him again?  “Your Majesty never chid me;” and as to his condemnation,