surprising circumstance is that he lived in an age in which the art of
writing justly and elegantly was little known, much less true philosophy.
Lord Bacon, as is the fate of man, was more esteemed after his death than
in his lifetime. His enemies were in the British Court, and his admirers
were foreigners.

When the Marquis d'Effiat attended in England upon the Princess Henrietta
Maria, daughter to Henry IV., whom King Charles I. had married, that
Minister went and visited the Lord Bacon, who, being at that time sick in
his bed, received him with the curtains shut close. "You resemble the
angels," says the Marquis to him; "we hear those beings spoken of
perpetually, and we believe them superior to men, but are never allowed
the consolation to see them."

You know that this great man was accused of a crime very unbecoming a
philosopher: I mean bribery and extortion. You know that he was
sentenced by the House of Lords to pay a fine of about four hundred
thousand French livres, to lose his peerage and his dignity of
Chancellor; but in the present age the English revere his memory to such
a degree, that they will scarce allow him to have been guilty. In case
you should ask what are my thoughts on this head, I shall answer you in
the words which I heard the Lord Bolingbroke use on another occasion.
Several gentlemen were speaking, in his company, of the avarice with
which the late Duke of Marlborough had been charged, some examples
whereof being given, the Lord Bolingbroke was appealed to (who, having
been in the opposite party, might perhaps, without the imputation of
indecency, have been allowed to clear up that matter): "He was so great a
man," replied his lordship, "that I have forgot his vices."

I shall therefore confine myself to those things which so justly gained
Lord Bacon the esteem of all Europe.

The most singular and the best of all his pieces is that which, at this
time, is the most useless and the least read, I mean his _Novum
Scientiarum Organum_. This is the scaffold with which the new philosophy
was raised; and when the edifice was built, part of it at least, the
scaffold was no longer of service.

The Lord Bacon was not yet acquainted with Nature, but then he knew, and
pointed out, the several paths that lead to it. He had despised in his
younger years the thing called philosophy in the Universities, and did
all that lay in his power to prevent those societies of men instituted to
improve hu