of the House. And he reported the
speeches of such persons as Lord Salisbury, probably throwing into them
both form and matter of his own. At length, "silently, on the 25th of
June," 1607, he was appointed Solicitor-General. He was then
forty-seven.

"It was also probably about this time," writes Mr. Spedding, "that Bacon
finally settled the plan of his '_Great Instauration_,' and began to
call it by that name."

CHAPTER IV.

BACON SOLICITOR-GENERAL.

The great thinker and idealist, the great seer of a world of knowledge
to which the men of his own generation were blind, and which they could
not, even with his help, imagine a possible one, had now won the first
step in that long and toilsome ascent to success in life, in which for
fourteen years he had been baffled. He had made himself, for good and
for evil, a servant of the Government of James I. He was prepared to
discharge with zeal and care all his duties. He was prepared to perform
all the services which that Government might claim from its servants. He
had sought, he had passionately pressed to be admitted within that
circle in which the will of the King was the supreme law; after that, it
would have been ruin to have withdrawn or resisted. But it does not
appear that the thought or wish to resist or withdraw ever presented
itself; he had thoroughly convinced himself that in doing what the King
required he was doing the part of a good citizen, and a faithful servant
of the State and Commonwealth. The two lives, the two currents of
purpose and effort, were still there. Behind all the wrangle of the
courts and the devising of questionable legal subtleties to support some
unconstitutional encroachment, or to outflank the defence of some
obnoxious prisoner, the high philosophical meditations still went on;
the remembrance of their sweetness and grandeur wrung more than once
from the jaded lawyer or the baffled counsellor the complaint, in words
which had a great charm for him, _Multum incola fuit anima mea_--"My
soul hath long dwelt" where it would not be. But opinion and ambition
and the immense convenience of being great and rich and powerful, and
the supposed necessities of his condition, were too strong even for his
longings to be the interpreter and the servant of nature. There is no
trace of the faintest reluctance on his part to be the willing minister
of a court of which not only the principal figure, but the arbiter and
governing spirit, was to