in good-humour. They voted
money at once. One of the matters which interested Bacon most--the
revision of the Statute Book--they took up as one of their first
measures, and appointed a Select Committee to report upon it. And what,
amid the apparent felicity of the time, was of even greater personal
happiness to Bacon, the first step of the "Great Instauration" had been
taken. During the previous autumn, Oct. 12, 1620, the _Novum Organum_,
the first instalment of his vast design, was published, the result of
the work of thirty years; and copies were distributed to great people,
among others to Coke. He apprehended no evil; he had nothing to fear,
and much to hope from the times.

His sudden and unexpected fall, so astonishing and so irreparably
complete, is one of the strangest events of that still imperfectly
comprehended time. There had been, and were still to be, plenty of
instances of the downfall of power, as ruinous and even more tragic,
though scarcely any one more pathetic in its surprise and its shame. But
it is hard to find one of which so little warning was given, and the
causes of which are at once in part so clear, and in part so obscure and
unintelligible. Such disasters had to be reckoned upon as possible
chances by any one who ventured into public life. Montaigne advises that
the discipline of pain should be part of every boy's education, for the
reason that every one in his day might be called upon to undergo the
torture. And so every public man, in the England of the Tudors and
Stuarts, entered on his career with the perfectly familiar expectation
of possibly closing it--it might be in an honourable and ceremonious
fashion, in the Tower and on the scaffold--just as he had to look
forward to the possibility of closing it by small-pox or the plague. So
that when disaster came, though it might be unexpected, as death is
unexpected, it was a turn of things which ought not to take a man by
surprise. But some premonitory signs usually gave warning. There was
nothing to warn Bacon that the work which he believed he was doing so
well would be interrupted.

We look in vain for any threatenings of the storm. What the men of his
time thought and felt about Bacon it is not easy to ascertain.
Appearances are faint and contradictory; he himself, though scornful of
judges who sought to be "popular," believed that he "came in with the
favour of the general;" that he "had a little popular reputation, which
followeth