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University Counsel since the 10th of November, 1613, and had been retained in the same capacity by Trinity College during the years 1614-16. It was not known till the 3rd of March, 1616-7, that the Lord Chancellor resigned the Great Seal, which on the 7th of the same month was delivered by the King into the hands of Bacon. ‘Our new Lord-Keeper,’ says Chamberlain, ‘goes with great state, having a world of followers put upon him, though he had more than enough before.’ On the first day of Term (May 7) he rode in pomp to Westminster, with a train of two hundred gallants, and delivered his inaugural speech in Chancery, in which he published the charge which the King gave him when he received the Seal, and the rules he had laid down for his own conduct. Such was his marvellous energy in his new office, that in the course of a month he had cleared off all arrears, and on the 8th of June he reports to Buckingham that there is not one cause unheard. A week after his appointment the King took his departure for Scotland, leaving Bacon at the head of the Council to manage affairs in his absence. In the same year we find him using his influence with the King to dissuade him from the Spanish match, and with Buckingham to prevent the marriage of his brother, Sir John Villiers, with the daughter of Sir Edward Coke. The issue of both showed that his counsel was wise, but the King and Buckingham alike resented his interference. Coke’s animosity was of course not lessened by it. But for the present the career of Bacon’s prosperity was unchecked. On the 4th of January, 1617-8, he became Lord Chancellor, and on the 11th of July in the same year he was created Baron Verulam. In his inaugural speech as Lord-Keeper, he had announced his intention of reserving ‘the depth of the three long vacations’ for the studies, arts, and sciences, to which in his own nature he was most inclined. How well he had employed these moments of retirement from the business of his office became evident when, in October, 1620, he presented the King with the great work of his life, the Novum Organum, the object of which, he says, is to ‘enlarge the bounds of reason, and to endow man’s estate