If he was pusillanimous in the moment of the
storm, his spirit, his force, his varied interests, returned the moment
the storm was past. His self-reliance, which was boundless, revived. He
never allowed himself to think, however men of his own time might judge
him, that the future world would mistake him. "_Aliquis fui inter
vivos_," he writes to Gondomar, "_neque omnino intermoriar apud
posteros_." Even in his time he did not give up the hope of being
restored to honour and power. He compared himself to Demosthenes, to
Cicero, to Seneca, to Marcus Livius, who had been condemned for corrupt
dealings as he had been, and had all recovered favour and position.
Lookers-on were puzzled and shocked. "He has," writes Chamberlain, "no
manner of feeling of his fall, but continuing vain and idle in all his
humours as when he was at the highest." "I am said," Bacon himself
writes, "to have a feather in my head."

Men were mistaken. His thoughts were, for the moment, more than ever
turned to the future; but he had not given up hope of having a good deal
to say yet to the affairs of the present. Strangely enough, as it seems
to us, in the very summer after that fatal spring of 1621 the King
called for his opinion concerning the reformation of Courts of Justice;
and Bacon, just sentenced for corruption and still unpardoned, proceeds
to give his advice as if he were a Privy Councillor in confidential
employment. Early in the following year he, according to his fashion,
surveyed his position, and drew up a paper of memoranda, like the notes
of the _Commentarius Solutus_ of 1608, about points to be urged to the
King at an interview. Why should not the King employ him again? "Your
Majesty never chid me;" and as to his condemnation, "as the fault was
not against your Majesty, so my fall was not your act." "Therefore," he
goes on, "if your Majesty do at any time find it fit for your affairs to
employ me publicly upon the stage, I shall so live and spend my time as
neither discontinuance shall disable me nor adversity shall discourage
me, nor anything that I do give any new scandal or envy upon me." He
insists very strongly that the King's service never miscarried in his
hands, for he simply carried out the King's wise counsels. "That his
Majesty's business never miscarried in my hands I do not impute to any
extraordinary ability in myself, but to my freedom from any particular,
either friends or ends, and my careful receipt of his direction