It was some time before even the strong mind of Atterbury recovered from this cruel blow. As soon as he was himself again, he became eager for action and conflict: for grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless. The Pretender, dull and bigoted as he was, had found out that he had not acted wisely in parting with one who, though a heretic, was, in abilities and accomplishments, the foremost man of the Jacobite party. The bishop was courted back, and was without much difficulty induced to return to Paris and to become once more the phantom minister of a phantom monarchy. But his long and troubled life was drawing to a close. To the last, however, his intellect retained all its keenness and vigor. He learned, in the ninth year of his banishment, that he had been accused by Oldmixon, as dishonest and malignant a scribbler as any that has been saved from oblivion by the Dunciad, of having, in concert with other Christ Churchmen, garbled Clarendon's History of the Rebellion. The charge, as respected Atterbury, had not the slightest foundation; for he was not one of the editors of the History, and never saw it till it was printed. He published a short vindication of himself, which is a model in its kind, luminous, temperate, and dignified. A copy of this little work he sent to the Pretender, with a letter singularly eloquent and graceful. It was impossible, the old man said, that he should write any thing on such a subject, without being reminded of the resemblance between his own fate and that of Clarendon. They were the only two English subjects that had ever been banished from their country, and debarred from all communication with their friends by act of parliament. But here the resemblance ended. One of the exiles had been so happy as to bear a chief part in the restoration of the Royal house. All that the other could now do was to die asserting the rights of that house to the last. A few weeks after this let ter was written Atterbury died. He had just completed his seventieth year. His body was brought to England, and laid with great privacy under the nave of Westminster Abbey. Only three mourners followed the coffin. No inscription marks the grave. That the epitaph with which Pope honored the memory of his friend does not appear on the walls of the great national cemetery, is no subject of regret: for nothing worse was ever written by Colley Cibber. Those who wish for more complete information about Atterbury, may easily collect it from his sermons and his controversial writings, from the report of the parliamentary proceedings against him, which will be found in the State Trials; from the five volumes of his correspondence, edited by Mr. Nichols, and from the first volume of the Stuart papers, edited by Mr. Glover. A very indulgent, but a very interesting account of the Bishop's political career will be found in Lord Mahon's valuable History of England. FRANCIS BACON, VISCOUNT ST. ALBANS ANL BARON VERULAM. By THIS illustrious man was born in London on the twentysecond of January, 1561. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, a courtier, a lawyer, and a man of erudition, stood high, in the favor of Queen Elizabeth, and was lord-keeper during twenty years of her reign. Anne, the second wife of Sir Nicholas, and the philosopher's mother, was the daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, Edward the Sixth's tutor, and was herself distinguished among the learned females of the time. One of her sisters became the wife of Elizabeth's celebrated treasurer, Lord Burleigh. Delicate in health, and devoted to sedentary employment, Francis Bacon exhibited in early boyhood the dawning of those powers whose versatility afterwards became not less remarkable than their strength. As a child he delighted the queen with his precocious gravity and readiness of speech; and before he had completed his twelfth year we see him investigating the cause of a singular echo in a conduit, and endeavoring to penetrate the mystery of a juggler who performed in his father's house. At the age of thirteen he was matriculated at Trinity College, Cambridge, of which Whitgift was then master; but his residence at the University lasted scarcely three years, and his writings contain many expressions of dissatisfaction with the current system of academical education. In his sixteenth year he was sent abroad, and lived for some time at Paris, under the charge of the English ambassador, Sir Amias Paulett; after which he visited the French provinces, and added to his literary and philosophical studies an acquaintance with foreign policy and statistics, the fruit of which soon appeared in his tract upon the state of Europe. In February, 1580, his father died, and he immediately returned to England. Sir Nicholas left but a scanty fortune; and his son Francis, the youngest of a large family, found himself obliged, in his twentieth year, to devise the means of earning a livelihood. It might have been thought that friends could not have been wanting to one who, besides his own acknowledged merit, had it in his power to urge the long and honorable services of his father, while his uncle was the prime minister of the kingdom. Of the patronage which thus seemed to be at his command, Bacon attempted to avail himself, desiring to obtain such a public employment as might enable him to unite political activity in some degree with literary study. But his suit was received neglectfully by the queen, and harshly repulsed by his kinsman. Although all the causes of this conduct may not be discoverable, a few lie at the surface. The lord-keeper had, in the later years of his life, lost the royal favor. Burleigh, besides his notorious contempt for men of letters, had to provide for sons of his own, to whom their accomplished cousin might have proved a dangerous rival. From the Cecils, indeed, Bacon never derived any efficient aid, till he had forced his way upwards in spite of them; and there are evident traces of jealousy and dislike in the mode in which he was treated both by the old treasurer, and by his second son, Robert. Obliged, therefore, to betake himself to the law, Bacon was admitted at Gray's Inn, where he spent several years obscurely in the study of his profession, but with increasing practice at the bar. The friendship of his fellow lawyers, earned by his amiable disposition and his activity in the affairs of the society, bestowed on him offices in his inn of court; but his kinsmen were still cold and haughty. Lord Burleigh continued to write him letters of reproof; and Robert Cecil, already a rising statesman, sneered at speculative intellects, and insinuated their unfitness for the business of life. In 1590, when Bacon was in his thirtieth year, he was visited for the first time with court favor, receiving then an honorary appointment as queen's counsel extraordinary ; and to this was added a grant of the reversion of a clerkship in the star-chamber, which did not become vacant for eighteen years. But the lawyer's heart was not in his task. His brilliant professional success, and the awakening friendship of his relations, merely suggested to him renewed attempts to escape from the drudgery of the bar. His views are nobly expressed in a letter which he addressed to the lord-treasurer the year after his appointment.' We 1 "I was now somewhat ancient; one and thirty years is a great deal of sand in the hour-glass. My health, I thank God, I find confirmed, and I do not fear that action shall impair it; because I account my ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are. I ever bear a mind, in some middle place that I could discharge, to serve her majesty; not as a man born under Sol that loveth honor, nor under Jupiter that loveth business, for the contemplative planet carrieth me away wholly ; but as a man born under an excellent sovereign, that deserveth the dedication of all men's abilities. . . . . Again, the meanness of my estate doth somewhat move me; for, though I cannot accuse myself that I am either prodigal or slothful, yet my health is not to spend, nor my course to get. Lastly, I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends; for I have taken all knowledge to be my province; and if I could purge it of two sorts of rovers whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments, and auricular traditions and impostures, have committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries; the best state of that province, This, whether it be curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if one take it more favorably) philanthropia, is so fixed |