But the Parliament before which their report was to be laid did not meet till ten months after the work of the Commission was done (Dec., 1604—­Nov., 1605).  For nearly another year Bacon had no public work.  The leisure was used for his own objects.  He was interested in history in a degree only second to his interest in nature; indeed, but for the engrossing claims of his philosophy of nature, he might have been the first and one of the greatest of our historians.  He addressed a letter to the Chancellor Ellesmere on the deficiencies of British history, and on the opportunities which offered for supplying them.  He himself could at present do nothing; “but because there be so many good painters, both for hand and colours, it needeth but encouragement and instructions to give life and light unto it.”  But he mistook, in this as in other instances, the way in which such things are done.  Men do not accomplish such things to order, but because their souls compel them, as he himself was building up his great philosophical structure, in the midst of his ambition and disappointment.  And this interval of quiet enabled him to bring out his first public appeal on the subject which most filled his mind.  He completed in English the Two Books of the Advancement of Knowledge, which were published at a book-shop at the gateway of Gray’s Inn in Holborn (Oct., 1605).  He intended that it should be published in Latin also; but he was dissatisfied with the ornate translation sent him from Cambridge, and probably he was in a hurry to get the book out.  It was dedicated to the King, not merely by way of compliment, but with the serious hope that his interest might be awakened in the subjects which were nearest Bacon’s heart.  Like other of Bacon’s hopes, it was disappointed.  The King’s studies and the King’s humours were not of the kind to make him care for Bacon’s visions of the future, or his eager desire to begin at once a novel method of investigating the facts and laws of nature; and the appeal to him fell dead.  Bacon sent the book about to his friends with explanatory letters.  To Sir T. Bodley he writes: 

“I think no man may more truly say with the Psalm, Multum incola fuit anima mea [Ps. 120] than myself.  For I do confess since I was of any understanding, my mind hath in effect been absent from that I have done; and in absence are many errors which I willingly acknowledge; and among them, this great one which led the rest:  that knowing myself by inward calling to be fitter to hold a book than to play a part, I have led my life in civil causes, for which I was not very fit by nature, and more unfit by the preoccupation of my mind.  Therefore, calling myself home, I have now enjoyed myself; whereof likewise I desire to make the world partaker.”

To Lord Salisbury, in a note of elaborate compliment, he describes his purpose by an image which he repeats more than once.  “I shall content myself to awake better spirits, like a bell-ringer, which