rple, and hath made himself and
his wife such store of raiments of cloth of silver and gold that it
draws deep into her portion." Of his married life we hear next to
nothing: in his _Essay on Marriage_ he is not enthusiastic in its
praise; almost the only thing we know is that in his will, twenty years
afterwards, he showed his dissatisfaction with his wife, who after his
death married again. But it gave him an additional reason, and an
additional plea, for pressing for preferment, and in the summer of 1606
the opening came. Coke was made Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas,
leaving the Attorney's place vacant. A favourite of Salisbury's, Hobart,
became Attorney, and Bacon hoped for some arrangement by which the
Solicitor Doddridge might be otherwise provided for, and he himself
become Solicitor. Hopeful as he was, and patient of disappointments, and
of what other men would have thought injustice and faithlessness, he
felt keenly both the disgrace and the inconvenience of so often
expecting place, and being so often passed over. While the question was
pending, he wrote to the King, the Chancellor, and Salisbury. His letter
to the King is a record in his own words of his public services. To the
Chancellor, whom he believed to be his supporter, he represented the
discredit which he suffered--he was a common gaze and a speech;" "the
little reputation which by his industry he gathered, being scattered and
taken away by continual disgraces, _every new man coming above me_;" and
his wife and his wife's friends were making him feel it. The letters
show what Bacon thought to be his claims, and how hard he found it to
get them recognised. To the Chancellor he urged, among other things,
that time was slipping by--

"I humbly pray your Lordship to consider that time groweth precious
with me, and that a married man is seven years elder in his
thoughts the first day.... And were it not to satisfy my wife's
friends, and to get myself out of being a common gaze and a speech,
I protest before God I would never speak word for it. But to
conclude, as my honourable Lady your wife was some mean to make me
to change the name of another, so if it please you to help me to
change my own name, I can be but more and more bounden to you; and
I am much deceived if your Lordship find not the King well
inclined, and my Lord of Salisbury forward and affectionate."

To Salisbury he writes:

"I ma