t; and she appears to have almost
made it a rule to compensate every act of bounty towards himself, by
some sensible mortification which she made him suffer in the person of a
friend. So little was his patronage the road to advancement, that sir
Thomas Smith, clerk of the council, is recorded as the solitary instance
of a man preferred out of his household to the service of her majesty;
and Bacon himself somewhere says, speaking of the queen, "Against me she
is never positive but to my lord of Essex."

Fulk Greville was one of the few who did honor to themselves by becoming
at this time the advocate of Francis Bacon with the queen; and his
solicitations were heard by her with such apparent complacency, that he
wrote to Bacon, that he would wager two to one on his chance of becoming
attorney, or at least solicitor-general. But Essex was to be mortified,
and the influence of this generous Maecenas was exerted finally in vain.
To his unfortunate choice of a patron then, joined to the indiscreet
zeal with which that patron pleaded his cause "in season and out of
season," we are to ascribe in part the neglect experienced by Bacon
during the reign of Elizabeth. But other causes concurred, which it may
be interesting to trace, and which it would be injustice both to the
queen and to Burleigh to pass over in silence.

At the period when Bacon first appealed to the friendship of the lord
treasurer in the letter above cited, he was already in the thirtieth
year of his age, and had borne for two years the character of queen's
counsel extraordinary; but to the courts of law he was so entire a
stranger that it was not till one or two years afterwards that we find
him pleading his first cause. It was pretty evident therefore in 1592,
when he sought the office of attorney-general, that necessity alone had
made it the object of his wishes; and his known inexperience in the
practice of the law might reasonably justify in the queen and her
ministers some scruple of placing him in so responsible a post. As a
philosopher indeed, no encouragement could exceed his deserts; but this
was a character which very few even of the learned of that day were
capable of appretiating. Physical science, disgraced by its alliance
with the "blind experiments" of alchemy and the deluding dreams of
judicial astrology, was in possession of few titles to the respect of
mankind; and its professors,--credulous enthusiasts, for the most part,
or designing impost