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eminent personages in their last moments; in that only scene of life wherein we are all sure, later or sooner to resemble them. There remains only a Bacom, letter, the last he ever wrote, addressed to that noble- Letter cce. man under whose roof he died ; in which he compares himself to a celebrated philosopher of antiquity, Pliny the elder ; who lost his life by inquiring, with too dangerous a curiosity, into the first great eruption of Vesuvius.

Thus lived and died the lord chancellor Bacon.*

He was buried privately in St. Michael's church, near St. Alban's. The spot that contains his remains lay obscure and undistinguished, till the gratitude of a private man, formerly his servant, erected Sir Thomas

Meautys. a monument to his name and memory. In another country, in a better age, his monument would have stood a public proof in what veneration the whole society held a citizen, whose genius did them honour, and whose writings will instruct their latest posterity.

One passage in his will is remarkable. After bequeathing his soul and body in the usual form, he adds, “my name and memory I leave to foreign Baconiana, “ nations; and to mine own countrymen, after some P. 203.

* He continued single till after forty, and then took to wife a daughter of alderman Barnham of London, with whom he received a plentiful fortune, but had by her no children: and she out-lived him upwards of twenty years. Such readers as have any curiosity to know what regimen he observed, may take the following account of it in the words of his chaplain. “His diet was rather “plentiful and liberal than restrained. In his younger years he “ was much given to the finer and lighter sorts of meats: but after“wards he preferred the stronger, such as the shambles afforded: “ as those which bred the more firm and substantial juices, and “ less dissipable. He did not, you may be sure, neglect that “himself, which he so much extolled to others in his writings, the “frequent use of nitre ; whereof he took the quantity of about " three grains in thin warm broth every morning, for thirty years “ together. His ordinary physic was a maceration of rhubarb, in“ fused into a draught of white wine and beer mingled together for the space of half an hour, once in six or seven days, imme“diately before his meal, whether dinner or supper; that it might “ dry the body less. His receipt for the gout, which constantly “ gave him ease within two hours, is set down in the end of the " Natural History." See Vol. II. p. 225.

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“time be passed over.” As to the former, he was, even in his life-time, looked upon with admiration by the most eminent men that France and Italy could

then boast of; and by some of them visited, as one Voltaire, whose talents were an ornament, not only to his age, Lettres but to human nature itself. When the marquis Anglois

, D'Effiat brought into England the princess Henrietta

Maria, wife to Charles the First, he paid a visit to my lord Bacon ; who, being then sick in bed, received him with the curtains drawn. “You resemble the “ angels,” said that minister to him : “we hear those “ beings continually talked of, we believe them su

perior to mankind, and we never have the conso“ Iation to see them.” Among his countrymen, the names, alone, of those who have adopted his notions, and proceeded on his plan, are his highest encomium. To pass over a long line of philosophers, all illustrious; he reckons in the list of bis followers a Boyle,

a Locke, a Newton himself. Rawley's One singularity there was in his temperament, not

easily to be accounted for: in every eclipse of the moon, whether he observed it or not, he was certainly seized with a sudden fit of fainting ; which

left him, without any remaining weakness, as soon as Evelyn of the eclipse ended. He was of a middling stature;

his forehead spacious and open, early impressed with the marks of age; his eye lively and penetrating;

; his whole appearance venerably pleasing : so that the beholder was insensibly drawn to love, before he knew how much reason there was to admire him. In this respect, we may apply to my lord Bacon what Tacitus finely observes of his father-in-law, Agricola : a good man you would readily have judged him to be, and been pleased to find him a great man.

Those talents that commonly appear single in others, and they too men of reputation, shone forth in him united and eminent. All his contemporaries, even those who hated the courtier, stand up and bear

witness together to the superior abilities of the writer Osborn's and pleader, of the philosopher and companion. In

conversation he could assume the most differing cha

Life of
Bacon.

Medals,

p. 340.

Advice to - Son.

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racters, and speak the language proper to each, with a facility that was perfectly natural; or the dexterity of the habit concealed every appearance of art: a happy versatility of genius, which all men wish to arrive at, and one or two, once in an age, are seen to possess. In public, he commanded the attention of his hearers, and had their affections wholly in his power. As he accompanied what he spoke with all the expression and grace of action, his pleadings, that are now perhaps read without emotion, never failed to awaken in his audience the several passions he intended they should feel. This is not a picture of him drawn from fancy; it is copied, and that too B.Jonson, but in miniature, after another taken by one who iobesiDisknew him well ; a good judge of merit, and seldom known to err, at least in heightening a favourable likeness. As a philosopher, it is scarce hyperbolical to say of him, in Mr. Addison's words, that he had the sound, distinct, comprehensive knowledge of Aristotle, with all the beautiful lights, graces, and embellishments of Cicero. To this commendation of his talents, the learned throughout Europe have given their common sanction, and own him for the father of the only valuable philosophy, that of fact and observation.

It remains then to consider him, more particularly than we have hitherto done, in this most known and conspicuous part of his character; where his merit is unquestionably great and entirely his own. For, to the writings of the ancients he was not, he could not, be obliged. They had either mistaken the right road to natural knowledge; or if any of them struck into it by chance, finding the way difficult, obscure, and tedious, they soon abandoned it for ever. He owed to himself alone, to a certain intellectual sagacity, that beam of true discernment which shewed him at once, and as it were by intuition, what the most painful inquiries, for more than twenty ages backward, had searched after in vain. And here let me observe towards him the same impartiality I have hitherto aimed at: and, in order to know what he really did as a philosopher, place before the reader a

short view of the state of learning in Europe, from the dark period of Gothicism down to the sixteenth century. But let me at the same time acknowledge, that this account will be only a rude and imperfect sketch; consisting of a few detached particulars, without much order or method.

Although the great era of ignorance has been fixed, justly enough, to those times when the northern nations, like a mighty inundation, overspread the face of Europe; yet it is no less certain that barbarism and corruption were entered into arts and sciences ere the savages had made any impression on the Roman empire. Under them indeed, that darkness which had been long growing on the world, and gradually extinguishing every light of knowledge, soon became total, and threatened to be perpetual. In the eighth century, we find that the highest ambition of the clergy was to vie with one another in chanting the public service, which yet they hardly understood. This important emulation run so high

between the Latin and French priesthood, that CharAn. 787. lemagne, who was then at Rome, found it necessary

to interpose, and decide the controversy in person. Joannis The monk, who relates this affair with a most cirOp, t. iv. cumstantial exactness, adds, that the emperor en

treated pope Adrian to procure him certain persons, who might teach his subjects the first principles of grammar and arithmetic; arts that were then utterly unknown in his dominions. This warlike monarch, though his own education had been so far neglected that he had never learned to write, discovered, by his natural good sense, the value of knowledge, and set himself to be its promoter and patron. He even allowed a public school to be opened in the imperial palace, under the direction of our famous countryman Alcuin ; on whom he chiefly relied for introducing into France some tincture of that philosophy which was still remaining in Britain. But how slow and ineffectual the progress of any learning must

have been, we may guess from an edict of the coun813. cil of Challons, in the next century; which earnestly

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exhorts all monasteries to be careful in having their manuals of devotion correctly transcribed : lest, while Launoii, they piously mean to ask of God one thing, some in- p. 3. accurate manuscript may betray them into praying for the quite contrary. As to Britain, if learning had still some footing Hist

. et there in the eighth century, it was so totally exter- univer minated from thence in the ninth; that throughout Oxon. the whole kingdom of the West-Saxons, no man P. 13. could be found who was scholar enough to instruct our king Alfred, then a child, even in the first elements of reading : so that he was in his twelfth year before he could name the letters of the alphabet. When that renowned prince ascended the throne, he made it his study to draw his people out of the sloth and stupidity in which they lay: and became, as much by his own example, as by the encouragement he

gave to learned men, the great restorer of arts in his dominions. And here we are called upon to observe, that as France had been formerly obliged to England in the person of Alcuin, who planted the sciences there under Charlemagne; our island now received the same friendly assistance from thence by Grimbald, whom king Alfred had invited hither, 879. and made chancellor of Oxford. Such events as these are too considerable, in the literary history of the ninth age, to be passed over unobserved. The rise of a noted grammarian, the voyage of an applauded doctor, are recorded, by the chroniclers of that century, with the same reverence that an ancient writer would mention the appearance of a Lycurgus, or a Timoleon; of a lawgiver who new models a state, or a hero who rescues a whole people from slavery.

But these fair appearances were of short duration. A night of thicker darkness quickly overspread the intellectual world: and in the moral, followed a revolution still more deplorable. To common sense and piety, succeeded dreams and fables, visionary legends and ridiculous penances. The clergy, now utter strangers to all good learning, instead of guiding

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