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 of the Renaissance time.  To this he gave his best and deepest thoughts; for this he was for ever accumulating, and for ever rearranging and reshaping those masses of observation and inquiry and invention and mental criticism which were to come in as parts of the great design which he had seen in the visions of his imagination, and of which at last he was only able to leave noble fragments, incomplete after numberless recastings.  This was not indeed the only, but it was the predominant and governing, interest of his life.  Whether as solicitor for Court favour or public office; whether drudging at the work of the law or managing State prosecutions; whether writing an opportune pamphlet against Spain or Father Parsons, or inventing a “device” for his Inn or for Lord Essex to give amusement to Queen Elizabeth; whether fulfilling his duties as member of Parliament or rising step by step to the highest places in the Council Board and the State; whether