an agreeable one; after every allowance made for the fashions of
language and the necessities of a suitor, there is too much of insincere
profession of disinterestedness, too much of exaggerated profession of
admiration and devoted service, too much of disparagement and
insinuation against others, for a man who respected himself. He
submitted too much to the miserable conditions of rising which he found.
But, nevertheless, it must be said that it was for no mean object, for
no mere private selfishness or vanity, that he endured all this. He
strove hard to be a great man and a rich man. But it was that he might
have his hands free and strong and well furnished to carry forward the
double task of overthrowing ignorance and building up the new and solid
knowledge on which his heart was set--that immense conquest of nature on
behalf of man which he believed to be possible, and of which he believed
himself to have the key.

The letter to Lord Burghley did not help him much. He received the
reversion of a place, the Clerkship of the Council, which did not become
vacant for twenty years. But these years of service declined and place
withheld were busy and useful ones. What he was most intent upon, and
what occupied his deepest and most serious thought, was unknown to the
world round him, and probably not very intelligible to his few intimate
friends, such as his brother Antony and Dr. Andrewes. Meanwhile he
placed his pen at the disposal of the authorities, and though they
regarded him more as a man of study than of practice and experience,
they were glad to make use of it. His versatile genius found another
employment. Besides his affluence in topics, he had the liveliest fancy
and most active imagination. But that he wanted the sense of poetic
fitness and melody, he might almost be supposed, with his reach and play
of thought, to have been capable, as is maintained in some eccentric
modern theories, of writing Shakespeare's plays. No man ever had a more