not do as
Anaxagoras did, who reduced himself with contemplation unto
voluntary poverty, but this I will do--I will sell the inheritance
I have, and purchase some lease of quick revenue, or some office of
gain that shall be executed by deputy, and so give over all care of
service, and become some sorry book-maker, or a true pioneer in
that mine of truth which (he said) lay so deep. This which I have
writ unto your Lordship is rather thoughts than words, being set
down without all art, disguising, or reservation. Wherein I have
done honour both to your Lordship's wisdom, in judging that that
will be best believed of your Lordship which is truest, and to your
Lordship's good nature, in retaining nothing from you. And even so
I wish your Lordship all happiness, and to myself means and
occasions to be added to my faithful desire to do you service. From
my lodgings at Gray's Inn."

This letter to his unsympathetic and suspicious, but probably not
unfriendly relative, is the key to Bacon's plan of life; which, with
numberless changes of form, he followed to the end. That is, a
profession, steadily, seriously, and laboriously kept to, in order to
provide the means of living; and beyond that, as the ultimate and real
end of his life, the pursuit, in a way unattempted before, of all
possible human knowledge, and of the methods to improve it and make it
sure and fruitful. And so his life was carried out. On the one hand it
was a continual and pertinacious seeking after government employment,
which could give credit to his name and put money in his
pocket--attempts by general behaviour, by professional services when the
occasion offered, by putting his original and fertile pen at the service
of the government, to win confidence, and to overcome the manifest
indisposition of those in power to think that a man who cherished the
chimera of universal knowledge could be a useful public servant. On the
other hand, all the while, in the crises of his disappointment or
triumph, the one great subject lay next his heart, filling him with
fire and passion--how really to know, and to teach men to know indeed,
and to use their knowledge so as to command nature; the great hope to be
the reformer and restorer of knowledge in a more wonderful sense than
the world had yet seen in the reformation of learning and religion, and
in the spread of civilised order in the great states o