Francis Bacon - 1888 Author:John Nichol Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 178 CHAPTER VII. BACON'S FALL AND RETIREMENT. 1621-1626. The fall of England's greatest Chancellor was as sudden as that of his most prominent predeces... more »sor Cardinal Wolsey. Earlier it might have been the crowning theme of Juvenal, Boccaccio, Chaucer's " Monk's Tale," Lydgate, or Sackville, as it has been the recurring text of later preachers on " The Vanity of Human Wishes " ; but the most impressive sermon ever delivered on it is that, by anticipation, of Ealeigh towards the close of his universal History. " If we seek a reason of the succession and continuance of this boundless ambition in mortal men, we may add to that which hath been already said, that the kings and princes of the world have always had before them the actions but not the ends of those great ones which preceded them. They are always transported with the glory of the one, but they never mind the misery of the other till they find the experience in themselves; whereon follows the great apostrophe, ' 0 eloquent, just, and mighty death !' " Bacon's civil death (for such his sentence was) has beenThe Parliament of 1621. 179 referred to as a prelude to the overthrow of the Government he served, and as the Nemesis, coming with sure though lame foot, of his own former severities to greatness in the shade, and servilities to greatness in the sun. Both suggestions add rhetorical point to the catastrophe and have a basis in fact; but the most startling circumstance about his overthrow was its unexpectedness. " There had been," says Dean Church, " and were still to be, plenty of instances of the downfall of power, as ruinous and even more tragic. . . . But it is hard to find one of which so little warning was given, the causes of which are in part so clear and in part so obscure. . . . Every public man, in the ...« less