This letter to his unsympathetic and suspicious, but probably not
unfriendly relative, is the key to Bacon's plan of life; which, with
numberless changes of form, he followed to the end. That is, a
profession, steadily, seriously, and laboriously kept to, in order to
provide the means of living; and beyond that, as the ultimate and real
end of his life, the pursuit, in a way unattempted before, of all
possible human knowledge, and of the methods to improve it and make it
sure and fruitful. And so his life was carried out. On the one hand it
was a continual and pertinacious seeking after government employment,
which could give credit to his name and put money in his
pocket--attempts by general behaviour, by professional services when the
occasion offered, by putting his original and fertile pen at the service
of the government, to win confidence, and to overcome the manifest
indisposition of those in power to think that a man who cherished the
chimera of universal knowledge could be a useful public servant. On the
other hand, all the while, in the crises of his disappointment or
triumph, the one great subject lay next his heart, filling him with
fire and passion--how really to know, and to teach men to know indeed,
and to use their knowledge so as to command nature; the great hope to be
the reformer and restorer of knowledge in a more wonderful sense than
the world had yet seen in the reformation of learning and religion, and
in the spread of civilised order in the great states of the Renaissance
time. To this he gave his best and deepest thoughts; for this he was for
ever accumulating, and for ever rearranging and reshaping those masses
of observation and inquiry and invention and mental criticism which were
to come in as parts of the great design which he had seen in the visions
of his imagination, and of which at last he was only able to leave noble
fragments, incomplete after numberless recastings. This was not indeed
the only, but it was the predominant and governing, interest of his
life. Whether as solicitor for Court favour or public office; whether