now insolvent, a pension of twelve hundred pounds a year was bestowed on him; from his estate and other revenues he derived thirteen hundred pounds per annum more. On the 17th of October, his remaining penalties were remitted. It cannot but strike the reader as a most remarkable circumstance that, within eighteen months of the condemnation, all the penalties were successively remitted. Would this induce the belief that he was but the scape-goat of the court, that the condemnation was purely political? It is, we believe, to be explained ostensibly by the advanced age of Bacon, but really by the circumstance that the King’s favorite, Buckingham, was an accomplice.
Bacon discovered, alas! when it was too late, that the talent God had given him he had “misspent in things for which he was least fit;” or as Thomson has beautifully expressed it:20—
It is gratifying to turn from the melancholy scenes exhibited by the political life of Bacon, to behold him in his study in the deep search of truth; no contrast is more striking