favour of the great, because without it his great
designs could not be accomplished. His original plan of life was
disclosed in his letter to Lord Burghley: to get some office with an
assured income and not much work, and then to devote the best of his
time to his own subjects. But this, if it was really his plan, was
gradually changed: first, because he could not get such a place; and
next because his connection with Essex, the efforts to gain him the
Attorney's place, and the use which the Queen made of him after Essex
could do no more for him, drew him more and more into public work, and
specially the career of the law. We know that he would not by preference
have chosen the law, and did not feel that his vocation lay that way;
but it was the only way open to him for mending his fortunes. And so
the two lives went on side by side, the worldly one--he would have said,
the practical one--often interfering with the life of thought and
discovery, and partly obscuring it, but yet always leaving it paramount
in his own mind. His dearest and most cherished ideas, the thoughts with
which he was most at home and happiest, his deepest and truest
ambitions, were those of an enthusiastic and romantic believer in a
great discovery just within his grasp. They were such as the dreams and
visions of his great Franciscan namesake, and of the imaginative seekers
after knowledge in the middle ages, real or mythical, Albert the Great,
Cornelius Agrippa, Dr. Faustus; they were the eager, undoubting hopes of
the physical students in Italy and England in his own time, Giordano
Bruno, Telesio, Campanella, Gilbert, Galileo, or the founders of the
Italian prototype of "Solomon's House" in the _New Atlantis_, the
precursor of our Royal Societies, the Academy of the _Lincei_ at Rome.
Among these meditations was his inner life. But however he may have
originally planned his course, and though at times under the influence
of disappointment he threatened to retire to Cambridge or to travel
abroad, he had bound himself fast to public life, and soon ceased to
think of quitting it. And he had a real taste for it--for its shows, its
prizes, for the laws and turns of the game, for its debates and
vicissitudes. He was no mere idealist or recluse to undervalue or
despise the real grandeur of the world. He took the keenest interest in
the nature and ways of mankind; he liked to observe, to generalise in
shrewd and sometimes cynical epigrams. He liked to app