HIS FALL.—­The charges against him were varied and numerous, and easy of proof.  He had received bribes; he had given false judgments for money; he had perverted justice to secure the smiles of Buckingham, the favorite; and when a commission was appointed to examine these charges he was convicted.  With abject humility, he acknowledged his guilt, and implored the pity of his judges.  The annals of biography present no sorrier picture than this.  “Upon advised consideration of the charges,” he wrote, “descending into my own conscience, and calling my memory to account so far as I am able, I do plainly and ingenuously confess that I am guilty of corruption, and do renounce all defence.  O my lords, spare a broken reed!”

It is useless for his defenders, among whom the chief are Mr. Basil Montagu and Mr. Hepworth Dixon, to inform us that judges in that day were ill paid, and that it was the custom to receive gifts.  If Bacon had a defence to make and did not make it, he was a coward or a sycophant:  if what he said is true, he was a dishonest man, an unjust judge.  He was sentenced to pay a fine of L40,000, and to be imprisoned in the Tower at the king’s pleasure; the fine was remitted, and the imprisonment lasted but two days, a result, no doubt foreseen, of his wretched confession.  This was the end of his public career.  In retirement, with a pension of L1,200, making, with his other means, an annual income of L2,500, this “meanest of mankind” set himself busily to work to prove to the world that he could also be the “wisest and brightest;"[33] a duality of fame approached by others, but never equalled.  He was, in fact, two men in one:  a dishonest, truckling politician, and a large-minded and truth-seeking philosopher.

BEGINS HIS PHILOSOPHY.—­Retired in disgrace from his places at court, the rest of his life was spent in developing his Instauratio Magna, that revolution in the very principles and institutes of science—­that philosophy which, in the words of Macaulay, “began in observations, and ended in arts.”  A few words will suffice to close his personal history.  While riding in his coach, he was struck with the idea that snow would arrest animal putrefaction.  He alighted, bought a fowl, and stuffed it with snow, with his own hands.  He caught cold, stopped at the Earl of Arundel’s mansion, and slept in damp sheets; fever intervened, and on Easter Day, 1626, he died, leaving his great work unfinished, but in such condition that the plan has been sketched for the use of the philosophers who came after him.

He is said to have made the first sketch of the Instauratio when he was twenty-six years old, but it was much modified in later years.  He fondly called it also Temporis Partus Maximus, the greatest birth of Time.  After that he wrote his Advancement of Learning in 1605, which was to appear in his developed scheme, under the title De Augmentis Scientiarum, written in 1623.  His work advanced with and was modified by his investigations.