After the accession of James I Bacon con -tinned his active service in Parliament. He published papers on the religious situation and on the union of the English and Scottish crowns, and he served on a commission to ar range the terms of the union. In 1603 he was knighted, and in 1604 given a pension of MO. In 1605 he offered to King James the very important treatise on the
In 1613 he had been promoted to the at torney-generalship. In 1615 he prosecuted Baron St. John for denouncing benevolences, and in the same year he consented to the torture of Edmund Peacham, who was charged with hav ing written a treasonable sermon. He came in the latter case into conflict with his old enemy, Coke, who denied Peacham's guilt, and who also objected to the separate consultation of the judges by the Attorney-General. In 1617 Bacon helped to secure Coke's removal from the King's Bench for insufficient subserviency to the Crown. Coke's personal independence throughout the controversy has been often praised, and stands in favorable contrast with Bacon's self-seeking policy. At the same time it should be remembered that there was in volved a real issue between the legal and the political powers, and that Bacon, in resisting Coke's effort to make the court an arbiter of the Constitution, was fighting for the principle which actually prevailed, though under changed conditions, in English government.
Bacon took part in 1616 in the prosecution of the Earl of Somerset for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and after Somerset's fall he attached himself with ardor to George Villiers, the King's new favorite, in whom he seemed, along with many others, to be for the time genuinely deceived. Through Villiers (after ward Earl and Duke of Buckingham) Bacon received a succession of royal favors. In 1616 he was made Privy Councillor, in 1617 Lord Keeper and in 1618 Lord Chancellor. In July 1618 he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Verulam, and in 1621 he was made Viscount St. Alban. But his adherence to Bucking ham, who was growing steadily unpopular, led at last to disaster. In 1621 the Commons, led by Coke, would have called Bacon to account for defending Buckingham's increase of monopoly patents, if the King had not inter fered. Thereupon they sent to the Lords a formal accusation that Bacon had taken bribes from suitors in his court. Bacon at first treated the charges with unconcern. Then, when he found that the Lords meant to investigate them seriously, he collapsed and offered no defense. He was fined f40,000, imprisoned and banished from Parliament and the court In June 1621, he was released from the Tower, and retired to his family residence at Gorham bury; and in September of the same year the King pardoned him, though without restoring him to Parliament and the court. Bacon begged both James and Charles without avail for a further remission of his penalty, . While admitting the justice of his condemnation, he protested that there had been no juster judge in England for 50 years; and there is of course an important difference between corruption and perversion of justice. Although he constantly accepted gifts from suitors while their cases were pending, it does not appear that he ever perverted justice for money, and some of the cases urged against him were those in which the suitors had lost after giving him gifts. But this record is not so clear in cases where Buckingham interposed to ask favor for his friends, and in at least one instance he allowed a decision of his court to be practically set aside at that favorite's request.
Forbidden to re-enter the field of politics, Bacon devoted the last years of his life to the literary and scientific labors which had always divided his time and which he had professed to regard as his real and proper work; and he met his death as a result of a scientific experi ment. In March 1626, he caught cold while stuffing a fowl with snow in order to observe the effects of refrigeration on the preservation of meat. On 9 April he died of what is now known as bronclutis at the house of Lord Arundel, where he had been carried at the time of his attack. He was buried in Saint Michael's Church, Saint Albans.
Bacon's Writings.— From early youth, if tradition can be trusted, Bacon showed extraor dinary mental powers and a keen interest in philosophical pursuits. Throughout his life his labors in authorship kept pace closely with lus political work, and prone as he was to yield to the temptations of wealth and power, he seems really to have accorded the first place in life to what he called his °contemplative aims.° His strictly philosophical writings may, therefore, properly claim first attention among lus works. At the age of 23 he produced an essay which bore the ambitious title, 'The Greatest Birth of Time, or the Great Renewal of the Empire of Man Over the Universe} The work is now lost, but the title shows that the young author had already conceived some no tion of a °great instauration.° The (Partus
Masculus Temporis) (°The Male Birth of Timep), a fragment which is also of early date, is perhaps a modification of previous work. It contains little more than an attack on the false fancies (uidols°) of the older philosophies, and is Bacon's first plea for a rational union be tween the mind of man and the universe. The !Conference of Pleasure' (written for Essex in 1592), (Gesta Grayorum) (1594), and the 'Device on the Queen's Day' (1595) are not pnmarily philosophical works, but they contain many expressions of Bacon's intellectual ideals; and in the (Gesta Grayorum) there is an elabo rate proposal for the endowment of libraries, museums and establishments of research. (Valerius Terminus, of the Interpretation of Nature, with the Annotations of Hermes Stella' (written about 1603) is a fragmentary treatise anticipating some of the most familiar matter in the later philosophical works. In it Bacon defends the study of science from the charge of impiety, urges the importance of an encyclopedic survey of human knowledge, and mentions for the first time (though without ex plaining them) the four classes of °idols" which were afterward discussed in the (Novum Or ganum.) In 1605 Bacon presented to King James an English treatise of enduring value, 'The Advancernent of Learning.' This was a splendid attempt to defend and magnify the pur suit of learning and then to survey the exist:ing state of human knowledge. Part of the argu ment of the first part has lost its cogency, or even its relevancy, to-day. But in breadth of view and fertility of suggestion the work is extraordinary. As a statement of intellectual ideals, and a program, or even a prophecy, of their accomplishment, it stands among the most significant productions of the Renaissance. When Bacon sketched a few years later the plan of his 'Great Instauration,' he designated the (Advancement of Learning,' as a temporary fill ing of the first place on the "partitiones scien tiarum,'" and in his last years he made a greatly amplified Latin translation of it ((De Aug mends et Dignitate Scientiz)) to be incor porated in the great work. In 1606-07 he pub lished the (Outline and Argument) (Welineatio et Argumentum') of the second part of the Instauration, giving a brief general account of his new induction. In 1607 the (Cogitata et Visa de Interpretatione Naturm, sive de Sdentia Operativa) were published as an introduction to some investigations on motion. The (Cogitata> cover most of the ground after.vard traversed in the first book of the (Novum Organinn.' The (Redargutio Philosophiarum' (1609), one of the best specimens of Bacon's Latin style, contains an imaginary speech of a French philosopher to his disciples, and sets forth anew the author's ideas about the fruitlessness of the older philoso phies. The (De Sapientia Vetertun,) though it lies outside the immediate *scheme of the (Instauration) and might perhaps be mentioned rather among Bacon's literary works, is a very characteristic production containing an expo sition of his theory of ancient mythology. as an allegorical embodiment of moral and scientific wisdom. This primitive wisdom he was fond of extolling to the disparagement of the later philosophy of Aristotle, against which' he was in revolt. In 1611 and 1612 fall a number of scientific treatises of less importance. Not until 1620, after his long struggle to political power and on the eve of his fall, did Bacon publish the (Novum Organum,' though much of its material had been anticipated in his earlier writings. Prefixed to the work is a adistributio operis° for the whole (Instaura tion,' which was planned to contain the fol lowing parts; 1. Partitiones Scientiarum (rep resented temporarily by the English (Advance ment of Learning') ; Z Novum Organum (the new instniment of inductive method) ; 3. Pha- nomena Universi; 4.• Scala Intellectus (by which fanciful title he meant to indicate the operation of the new method in passing gradu ally from less general to more general principles (_per scalam verainP) ; 5. Prodromi Plulosophim Secundz (to contain such tentative discoveries as Bacon had made without using the new method) ; 6. Philosophia Secunda, sive Scientia Activa (a final embodiment of the results of the new philosophy). The first book of the (Novum Organum' was still introductory in character, discussing the uselessness of the older philoso phies, the traditional errors of manldnd, and the grounds of hope in the future of science. Ba con's optimistic devotion to science has been not ineptly compared with that of the young Renan. His classification of the (idols" (phantasms or delusions) of the tribe, the cave, the market place and the theatre, has become a literary commonplace. In the second book the new induction itself is finally expounded and illus trated by a study of the nature of heat. The exposition is incomplete and falls short, as in the nature of things it was bound to, of what Bacon himself apparently hoped to achieve, namely, a mechanical method of invention. Ba con never pursued the theory further, and in his later works he turned from the new method, or instrtunent, toward other parts of his great scheme. The (Parasceve ad Historiam Natura lem> (1620) is a brief and incomplete prepara tion for the third part of the Instauration, and was followed in 1622 by the 'Natural and Ex perimental History for the Foundations of Phi losophy, or Phenomena of the Universe, being the Third Part of the Great Instauration.' This treatise which was to take up winds, density and rarity, gravity, sympathy and antipathy of things, and a variety of other topics, was also left in a fragmentary state. In 1623 appeared the