substantial was
touched. His attitude was one of friendly and respectful independence.
It was not misunderstood by the King. Bacon, who had hitherto been an
unsworn and unpaid member of the Learned Counsel, now received his
office by patent, with a small salary, and he was charged with the grave
business of preparing the work for the Commissioners for the Union of
the Kingdoms, in which, when the Commission met, he took a foremost and
successful part.

But the Parliament before which their report was to be laid did not meet
till ten months after the work of the Commission was done (Dec.,
1604--Nov., 1605). For nearly another year Bacon had no public work. The
leisure was used for his own objects. He was interested in history in a
degree only second to his interest in nature; indeed, but for the
engrossing claims of his philosophy of nature, he might have been the
first and one of the greatest of our historians. He addressed a letter
to the Chancellor Ellesmere on the deficiencies of British history, and
on the opportunities which offered for supplying them. He himself could
at present do nothing; "but because there be so many good painters, both
for hand and colours, it needeth but encouragement and instructions to
give life and light unto it." But he mistook, in this as in other
instances, the way in which such things are done. Men do not accomplish
such things to order, but because their souls compel them, as he himself
was building up his great philosophical structure, in the midst of his
ambition and disappointment. And this interval of quiet enabled him to
bring out his first public appeal on the subject which most filled his
mind. He completed in English the _Two Books of the Advancement of
Knowledge_, which were published at a book-shop at the gateway of Gray's
Inn in Holborn (Oct., 1605). He intended that it should be published in
Latin also; but he was dissatisfied with the ornate translation sent him
from Cambridge, and probably he was in a hurry to get the book out. It
was dedicated to the King, not merely by way of compliment, but with the
serious hope that his interest might be awakened in the subjects which
were nearest Bacon's heart. Like other of Bacon's hopes, it was
disappointed. The King's studies and the King's humours were not of the
kind to make him care for Bacon's visions of the future, or his eager
desire to begin at once a novel method of investigating the facts and
laws of nature; and the appe