Page:The Advancement of Learning (Wright, 5th ed).pdf/37

was made King’s Serjeant, and Bacon became Solicitor General in his stead on the 25th of June, 1607.

He had now no longer to fear that want would either steal upon him as a wayfaring man or assault him as an armed man, and in the greater tranquillity of mind which resulted he gave himself up to the developement of his plan for enlarging the borders of human knowledge. The Great Instauration seems now to have taken a definite form, and as a means of clearing the way for its reception he wrote the treatise called Cogitata et Visa, which must have been the product of the latter half of the year 1607. His professional work of the same period is represented by ‘A view of the differences in question betwixt the King’s Bench and the Council in the Marches,’ and by two prceclamations, the one touching the Marches, the other concerning Jurors.

The next year (1608) is marked by the falling in of the clerkship of the Star-Chamber, by the death of William Mill on the 16th of July. Bacon had waited patiently for it nearly twenty years. In the summer vacation, and possibly during the unwilling leisure caused by an outbreak of the plague, he wrote his treatise In felicem memoriam Elizabethae, and towards the end of the year his discourse on the Plantation in Ireland, which will even now be read with interest. Letters to his friend Toby Matthew show that during the following year (1609) the Instauration was not laid aside. ‘My Instauration I reserve for our conference; it sleeps not.” He sent him ‘a leaf or two of the Preface, carrying some figure of the whole work.’ Shortly after he forwarded another portion, which may have been the Redargutio Philosophiarum. In the course of this year, also, he wrote and submitted to the judgement of the same friend, a little work of his recreation, as he calls it, the treatise De Sapientia Veterum, on the interpretation of the ancient fables of Greece and Rome. The Cogitata et Visa had undergone revision and elaboration at the same time, and a copy was sent in MS. to Bishop Andrewes, who had been translated from Chichester to Ely.

The session of 1609-10 was occupied with disputes between