a fuit anima mea_, bears
witness to the longings that haunted him in his hours of legal drudgery,
or in the service of his not very thankful employers. Not but that he
found compensation in the interest of public questions, in the company
of the great, in the excitement of state-craft and state employment, in
the pomp and enjoyment of court life. He found too much compensation; it
was one of his misfortunes. But his heart was always sound in its
allegiance to knowledge; and if he had been fortunate enough to have
risen earlier to the greatness which he aimed at as a vantage-ground for
his true work, or if he had had self-control to have dispensed with
wealth and position--if he had escaped the long necessity of being a
persistent and still baffled suitor--we might have had as a completed
whole what we have now only in great fragments, and we should have been
spared the blots which mar a career which ought to have been a noble
one.

The first important matter that happened after Bacon's new appointment
was the Essex divorce case, and the marriage of Lady Essex with the
favourite whom Cecil's death had left at the height of power, and who
from Lord Rochester was now made Earl of Somerset. With the divorce, the
beginning of the scandals and tragedies of James's reign, Bacon had
nothing to do. At the marriage which followed Bacon presented as his
offering a masque, performed by the members of Gray's Inn, of which he
bore the charges, and which cost him the enormous sum of L2000. Whether
it were to repay his obligations to the Howards, or in lieu of a "fee"
to Rochester, who levied toll on all favours from the King, it can
hardly be said, as has been suggested, to be a protest against the great
abuse of the times, the sale of offices for money. The "very splendid
trifle, the Masque of Flowers," was one form of the many extravagant
tributes paid but too willingly to high-handed worthlessness, of which
the deeper and darker guilt was to fill all faces with shame two years
afterwards.

As Attorney, Bacon had to take a much more prominent part in affairs,
legal, criminal, constitutional, administrative, than he had yet been
allowed to have. We know that it was his great object to show how much
more active and useful an Attorney he could be than either Coke or
Hobart; and as far as unflagging energy and high ability could make a
good public servant, he fully carried out his purpose. In Parliament,
the "addled Parliament" of 161