Having attained the highest honors of the state by truckling to the king and his favorite, B. proCeeded to abuse his judicial functions to increase his revenues, which, great as they were, were uneqUal to his extravagance. Though his official income was great, and his means had been enlarged by a marriage with the daughter of a wealthy alderman, he could only support his style of life by contracting debt and accepting 'tribes from suitors. Nor was money his only motive to false judgments; he more than once polluted the stream of justice, to maintain the favor of Buckingham. By 1621, the state of the courts had become so scandalous as to call for a parliamentary inquiry, which resulted in his being convicted, on his own written confession, of twenty-three acts of corruption. In consequence, he was condemned to pay a • fine of £110,000, and to be confined in the Tower during the king's pleasure; he was banislted for life from the court, and declared unlit to hold any office of state, or to sit in parliament. The fine, however, was remitted; the imprisonment lasted only two days; lie was allowed again to appear at court, Mid, indeed, was summoned to sit in'the very next parliament. Age. however, failing health, and perhaps shame, prevented him froth appearing. Banished from pliblic life, he henceforth devoted himself to literature and science, enjoying front the government a pension of .61200, and an annual income, in all, of £2500. Ilis mode of life still, however, continued to be so prodigal and ostentatious that, itt his death. in 1626, his debts amounted to upwards of 1'22,000. The immediate occasion of death (as related by Aubrey, who probably got it from Hobbes, who was B.'s intimate friend) was cold caught in making an experiment to test the power of snow to preserve flesh. He died in the house of the earl of Artindel, to which he had been removed with the fatal chill upon him which he had caught in the course of the experiment.
Mile, on the whole, thepublic life of lord B. is marked by meanness and dis honor, his literary and scientific. works me everywhere irradiated by the powerful light of an intellect which towered over those of other men. The first edition of his Essays appeared in 1557: his two books of the Adrancernent of Learning in 1605; his Wisdom of the Ancients—in Latin—in 1610; a third edition of his Eisays, greatly extended, in 1612; his two books of the NOMA Organtem, or .0evand part of the Iastauratio Mauna, designed to consist of six parts—also in Latin—in 1620; his History of the Reign of Henry VII., in 1622; his nine books. De .Augmentis Latin translation and exten sion of his Advancement of 1623. Besides these, he wrote several minor works, which need not here be specially mentioned. It is enough to say that his writ ings embrace almost all subjects, from jurisprudence—which he treated not as a mere lawyer, hut as a legislator and philosopher—to morality and medicine. The Semitones l'ideles is treasury of the deepest knowledge of human relations, conveyed in a gorgeous and energetic style. Almost the only science with which lie was unacquainted was that of mathematics. Thus singularly gifted and accomplished, he appeared at a time when science, from a variety of causes, started on that progress which has never since been arrested. If it is now a question how far lie contributed by his genius to that progress at its commencement, it is a fact that he was long vulgarly regarded by his countrymen as the father of inductive philosophy—as having been the inventor and first teacher of the method of interrogating nature by observation and experiment and inductive reason ing. Nor are his writings wanting in materials qualified ex facie to support his title to
that eminence. His claim to the distinction, however, has of late been the subject of much controversy, the result of which is that it has been generally disallowed. But if it be true that he had a somewhat vague and imperfect apprehension of the philosophy of induction, overestimated the province of observation, and undervalued the use of deduction and hypothesis, and that even his classification of the sciences in the De Augmentis, on which his reputation long turned, has been properly superseded by the superior and better-reasoned classification of 31. Comte; still it must be borne in mind that lie was one of the first that was aware of the true character of the positive philoso phy, and who understood its conditions, and foresaw its final supremacy; and as for his classification, that it was a marvelous effort of reason at a time when the sciences were in their infancy, and many of them were yet unborn. Also, it must be said, that if B. cannot be claimed by the physicists as the father of their science, and they must look rather to Galileo, yet he may fairly be claimed in that character by the students of man and society; for be was the first to aim at the extension of the methods of positive philosophy to moral and social conceptions. If recent criticisms have dethroned him from the position which for centuries be occupied in relation to the physical sciences, by showing that neither his doctrines, experiments, nor writings have materially affected their course, it is only to leave him free to be placed in a position no less dignified iu relation to human and social philosophy, As a writer, B. presents us in combination an intellect at once one of the most capacious and profound that ever appeared among men—one of the most penetrating, one of the most far-reaching—and an imagination almost equally remarkable. In no other writer is so much profound thought to be found expressed in such splendid eloquence. " If," says Hallam (Literature of Europe, iii. 218), " we compare 'what may be found in the sixth, seventh, and eighth books De Augmentis, in the E.t.says, the History of Henry VII, and the various short treatises contained in his works on morn) and political wisdom and on human nature, from experience of which all such wisdom is drawn, with the rhetoric, ethics, and politics of Aristotle, or with the historians most celebrated for their deep insight into civil society and human character—with Thucy dides, Tacitus, Philip de Comines, Machiavel, Davila, Hume—we shall, I think, find that one man may almost be compared with all of these together." The collected works and life of lord B. were published by Mallet in 5 vols. (Loud. 1765); a good edition is that of Montague (16 vols., Load. 1825-34); but the best, it is generally admitted, is the last (Works, 7 vols., edited by Spedding„ Ellis, and Heath. l858-59; Letters and Life, 7 vols.,' by Spedding, 1862-74). An able review of B.'s character is to be found among Macaulay's Essays. The Encycloperdias Britannica and „iletropolitana contain valuable papers on his writings, on which also sir J. Herschel's Preliminary Discourse in I,ardner's Encyclopedia may be consulted.