your Majesty and
greatness. _He is gone from whom those courses did wholly flow._ To
have your wants and necessities in particular as it were hanged up
in two tablets before the eyes of your lords and commons, to be
talked of for four months together; To have all your courses to
help yourself in revenue or profit put into printed books, which
were wont to be held _arcana imperii_; To have such worms of
aldermen to lend for ten in the hundred upon good assurance, and
with such entreaty (?) as if it should save the bark of your
fortune; To contract still where mought be had the readiest
payment, and not the best bargain; To stir a number of projects for
your profit, and then to blast them, and leave your Majesty nothing
but the scandal of them; To pretend even carriage between your
Majesty's rights and ease of the people, and to satisfy neither.
These courses and others the like I hope are gone with the deviser
of them; which have turned your Majesty to inestimable prejudice."

And what he thought of saying, but on further consideration struck out,
was the following. It is no wonder that he struck it out, but it shows
what he felt towards Cecil.

"I protest to God, though I be not superstitious, when I saw your
M.'s book against Vorstius and Arminius, and noted your zeal to
deliver the majesty of God from the vain and indign comprehensions
of heresy and degenerate philosophy, as you had by your pen formerly
endeavoured to deliver kings from the usurpation of Rome, _perculsit
illico animum_ that God would set shortly upon you some visible
favour, _and let me not live if I thought not of the taking away of
that man_."

And from this time onwards he scarcely ever mentions Cecil's name in his
correspondence with James but with words of condemnation, which imply
that Cecil's mischievous policy was the result of private ends. Yet this
was the man to whom he had written the "New Year's Tide" letter six
months before; a letter which is but an echo to the last of all that he
had been accustomed to write to Cecil when asking assistance or offering
congratulation. Cecil had, indeed, little claim on Bacon's gratitude; he
had spoken him fair in public, and no doubt in secret distrusted and
thwarted him. But to the last Bacon did not choose to acknowledge this.
Had James disclosed something of his dead servant, who left some st