ment and neglect, the last sad chapter
of a life which had begun so brightly, which had achieved such permanent
triumphs, which had lost itself so often in the tangles of insincerity
and evil custom, which was disfigured and marred by great misfortunes,
and still more by great mistakes of his own, which was in many ways
misunderstood not only by his generation but by himself, but which he
left in the constant and almost unaccountable faith that it would be
understood and greatly honoured by posterity. With all its glories, it
was the greatest shipwreck, the greatest tragedy, of an age which saw
many.

But in these gloomy and dreary days of depression and vain hope to which
his letters bear witness--"three years and five months old in misery,"
again later, "a long cleansing week of five years' expiation and
more"--his interest in his great undertaking and his industry never
flagged. The King did not want what he offered, did not want his
histories, did not want his help about law. Well, then, he had work of
his own on which his heart was set; and if the King did not want his
time, he had the more for himself. Even in the busy days of his
Chancellorship he had prepared and carried through the press the _Novum
Organum_, which he published on the very eve of his fall. It was one of
those works which quicken a man's powers, and prove to him what he can
do; and it had its effect. His mind was never more alert than in these
years of adversity, his labour never more indefatigable, his powers of
expression never more keen and versatile and strong. Besides the
political writings of grave argument for which he found time, these five
years teem with the results of work. In the year before his death he
sketched out once more, in a letter to a Venetian correspondent, Fra
Fulgenzio, the friend of Sarpi, the plan of his great work, on which he
was still busy, though with fast diminishing hopes of seeing it
finished. To another foreign correspondent, a professor of philosophy
at Annecy, and a distinguished mathematician, Father Baranzan, who had
raised some questions about Bacon's method, and had asked what was to be
done with metaphysics, he wrote in eager acknowledgment of the interest
which his writings had excited, and insisting on the paramount
necessity, above everything, of the observation of facts and of natural
history, out of which philosophy may be built. But the most
comprehensive view of his intellectual projects in all dir