from the reluctance with which they are made. Let this be borne in mind, and the following will need no comment.

'Truly I did never know any man of so great an apprehension, of so great love and affection,— —a man so truly just, so free from all cruelty and pride, such a lover of the church, and one that had done so much good for the church. In effect, all the bishoprics in Ireland and Scotland were erected and endowed by him; whereof one bishopric in Ireland, as I have heard, namely, Clogher, doth exceed any one bishopric in England. And as I have spoken this in his commendation, so, on the other side, I must needs blame him, that he was a man wonderfully passionate, much given to swearing, and he was not so careful of his carriage as he might be. I heard a very wise man take great exceptions against him, that the first year of his coming hither, when there was in London a greater plague than ever before had been, yet he took it not to heart, nor made such use of God's judgments as he should have done; for he never neglected one day's hunting, and in his words he sometimes gave great offence both in respect of God and man. I forbear to instance in them: yet, to excuse them a little, this was for the instant and in hot blood; for if you would give him but a little respite he was as patient as any man, and could as well moderate his passion.'-Ib. pp. 91, 92.

The Gunpowder Plot comes in, of course, for a share of the bishop's attention, but his narrative adds little to our previous stock of facts. It is well known that the Catholics looked to the accession of the son of Mary to the English throne with considerable expectations. They had suffered much in his mother's cause, and it was therefore natural for them to anticipate some exercise of forbearance and kindness from the son. In this, however, they were disappointed. The filial virtues did not flourish in the heart of James; and he retained, consequently, no sense of obligation to those who had befriended his ill-fated and injured parent. His conduct during his long imprisonment had been any thing but honorable, so as to leave on every observant spectator the full conviction that, whatever might be his anxiety on her account, his solicitude to secure a peaceful succession to the throne of Elizabeth was vastly more efficacious. We need not, therefore, be surprised that the dark and scheming spirits of some of the Catholics sought to punish his ingratitude, and to avenge the wrongs of their fallen church, by calling to their aid the demon powers of mischief. They did every way conclude,' says Goodman, that their estate was desperate; they could die but once, ' and their religion was more precious unto them than their lives.' Out of this bitter disappointment originated the Gunpowder Plot, the principal actors in which are thus sketched by our author:

'Now I must describe the persons of some of those traitors. Percy was a kinsman to the Earl of Northumberland: the earl, being captain

of the Pensioners, did make him one of the King's Pensioners. It is certain that he was a very loose liver-that he had two wives, one in the south and another in the north. An honourable good lady said, she knew them both; his wife in the south was so mean and poor that she was fain to teach school and bring up gentlewomen; there are yet some living that were her scholars. He living then with the Earl of Northumberland, the house was not thought to be very religious. I remember there was a report that one Hericke did use to resort to the house, and that he was wont there to read lectures of atheism; so I conceive that Percy was not very religious. Then, for Catesby, it is very well known that he was a very cunning subtle man, exceedingly entangled in debts, and scarce able to subsist. This man took a house in Lambeth, and to this house all the barrels of powder were to be brought, that so by night they might be conveyed to Mr. Percy's house, who had taken a house from the keeper of the parliament, with an intent to undermine the parliament house; but coming to a wall, and finding it very hard and difficult, and the gentlemen not accustomed to labour or to be pioneers, they fell to an easier course, to hire the coal-house under the parliament, and there to put in so much charcoal as would hide and cover the barrels of powder; and yet they were so negligent as they did not throw in that earth which they digged out of the mine, but left it open that it might be seen;-and I myself did see it.

To these I will annex Tresham, a man of a good estate, and a strict catholic; and he it was that wrote the letter to my Lord Mounteagle, who lived then at Bethnall Green near Aldgate; and this man was thought to be somewhat weak in judgment, and it is not unlike he might help out other men's poverty and bear a great part of the charge.

There was there Christopher Winter, a man, as I take it, of a good estate; there was Thomas Winter, a very able understanding man. There was there Mr. Rookwood, a man of a competent estate but somewhat indebted, very ingenious, and a man exceedingly well beloved. And to conclude all, there was Henry Garnet, the provincial jesuit, a very learned man, and a very judicious, nice, understanding man.

6

Now it is conceived that when as once they had entered into traitorous considerations and were guilty of treason, that Percy, who hired this house adjoining the parliament, did put them upon this particular plot; and this is most certain; I will name my author, who is beyond all exception, Sir Francis Moore, who had been an ancient acquaintance to this Mr. Percy, for he had formerly solicited the Earl of Northumberland's suits, and had married his wife out of that house. Being the Lord Keeper Egerton's favourite, and having some occasion of business with him at twelve of the clock at night, and going then homeward from York House to the Middle Temple at two, several times he met Mr. Percy coming out of that great statesman's house and wondered what his business should be there. But now the time came of acting this treason; and the plot was, that Faux alone should be left in Westminster to act the deed, while all the rest should be in the country, and there, under colour of a great hunting, they should

VOL. VI.

H

seize upon the person of the Lady Elizabeth, the king's eldest daughter. Now before, Tresham in his letter to my Lord Mounteagle did wish him to absent himself the first day of the parliament, for that God and man had resolved to take sudden vengeance, or to that effect.

This letter my Lord Mounteagle did instantly impart to the secretary; the Secretary did instantly acquaint the King and some of the council therewith: the King must have the honour to interpret it, that it was by gunpowder; and the very night before the parliament began it was to be discovered, to make the matter the more odious and the deliverance more miraculous. No less than the lord chamberlain must search for it and discover it, and Faux with his dark lantern must be apprehended. This being discovered, while the rest of the traitors were in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, they had seized upon some horses for war in Sir Fulke Greville's stable in Warwick Castle; but as soon as they heard that the treason was discovered and prevented in the parliament house, they desisted in their design, and all of them betook themselves to one house, where immediately they were beset; and while they were drying their gunpowder at the fire, a spark took some of it, whereby some of the company were blasted, which they did ascribe to the just judgment of God, that seeing they would have blown up others, they by God's mercy escaped, and they themselves were punished in the same kind.

Now here was a great oversight; that whereas there was no possibility that the traitors could resist, nor any hope that they could escape, neither did they kill any one man that did beset them, therefore a special charge should have been given that they should take the traitors alive, whereby that upon the rack they might discover the whole plot. Now they that beset them were permitted to shoot, and did kill Percy and Catesby, the two principal contrivers of the plot, and none but they were killed; and some will not stick to report, that the great statesman sending to apprehend these traitors gave special charge and direction for Percy and Catesby, 'Let me never see them alive; who it may be would have revealed some evil counsel given. As for Tresham, he fell very sick in the Tower; and Butler, the great physician of Cambridge, coming to visit him as his fashion was, he gave him a piece of very pure gold to be put in his mouth; and upon the taking out of that gold, Butler said that he was poisoned. For the keeper of the parliament house, who let out the lodgings to Percy, it is said that as soon as ever he heard of the news what Percy intended, he instantly fell into a fright and died; so that it could not be certainly known who procured him the house, or by whose means.

Now the traitors impeached none others; yet the state knowing where to find out Garnet, the provincial jesuit, did apprehend him, and having nothing to lay to his charge, they put him into a chamber where they knew he would have a confessor. Nothing could be spoken there so softly but others could hear it; so that two overheard him making his confession, and acknowledging that in hearing the confession of others he had knowledge thereof, for which he was condemned and executed. It hath since appeared that divers priests in their letters to Rome did much complain that they found Catholics very

desperate, and that they could not persuade them to any obedience, but did much fear they intended mischief.'-Ib. 102-108.

Another account of this memorable conspiracy is furnished in the second volume, in a letter from Sir Edward Hobart to Sir Thomas Edmonds, the English ambassador at Brussels; but our space forbids its insertion.

Bacon was no favorite with Goodman; the bishop was too honest to love so unscrupulous and abject a courtier; though we suspect we are somewhat indebted to the fall of the latter for the accuracy—would that we could disbelieve it-of the following description:

Now for Bacon, certainly he was a man of very great intellectuals, and a man who did every way comply with the King's desires; and he was a great projector in learning, as did appear by his Advancement of Learning,' to which book I would have given some answer if I durst have printed it. Over other men he did insult, and took bribes on both sides; and had this property, that he would not question any man for words against him, as knowing himself to be faulty, and therefore would not bring his adversaries upon the stage. Secretary Winwood was a man of courage, and the difference fell out upon a very small occasion, that Winwood did beat his dog from lying upon a stool, which Bacon seeing, said that every gentleman did love a dog. This passed on; then at the same time, having some business to sit upon, it should seem that Secretary Winwood sate too near my lord keeper; and his lordship willed him either to keep or to know his distance. Whereupon he arose from table, and I think he did him no good office. It is certain there were many exceptions against Bacon: no man got more dishonestly, and no man spent more wastefully; and how fit this man was to carry the King's conscience, whom I believe no other man would trust! And so, no marvel, at length he came to be discovered; and even after his fall, he still continued ambitious, and did practise so much as he could to rise again.'-Ib. pp. 283, 284.

Bacon's correspondence, so far as it has been preserved, fully sustains the severest charges which have been preferred against him. There is, however, something so painful in the admission of these charges, that we can readily excuse the zeal with which the disciples of his philosophy have sought to rebut them. We would gladly join with them in the chivalrous effort, did we not feel that the claims of truth were paramount even to those of Bacon; and that, whatever might be effected on behalf of the latter, must be purchased by an injury done to to former. History testifies-and it is in vain to turn a deaf ear to her verdict that in the case of Bacon, the intellectual and the moral were in contrast rather than in harmony; that the elements of earth and heaven were strangely blended in his character; that

he united to an extent rarely seen, and never surpassed, the highest endowments with the meanest and most abject spirit; an unquenchable thirst for truth in all her diversified forms, with a disgraceful shrinking from the practical application of her rules to the conduct of human life. Mr. Brewer has printed in his second volume three letters of Bacon; one to King James, and the other two to the favorite Buckingham. They were all written subsequent to his disgrace, and are but too characteristic of the meanness which distinguished the man. The dignity of our nature is insulted when we hear the great philosopher addressing the court puppet of the day-the vain, unprincipled, and reckless Buckingham-in such language as the following: 'I now find that, ' in building upon your lordship's noble nature and friendship, I have built upon a rock where neither winds or rains can cause ' overthrow.' But we dismiss this painful subject with the following letter to the King:

'MAY IT PLEASE YOUR SACRED MAJESTY,

I acknowledge myself in all humbleness infinitely bounden to your Majesty's grace and goodness, for that, at the intercession of my noble and constant friend my Lord Marquis, your Majesty hath been pleased to grant me that which the civilians say is res inestimabilis,-my liberty; so that now, whenever God calleth me, I shall not die a prisoner. Nay, farther, your Majesty hath vouchsafed to cast a second and iterate aspect of your eye of compassion upon me, in referring the consideration of my broken estate to my good lord the Lord Treasurer; which as it is a singular bounty in your Majesty, so I have yet so much left of a late commissioner of your treasure, as I would be sorry to sue for any thing that might seem immodest.

These your Majesty's great benefits in casting your bread upon the waters (as the Scripture saith), because my thanks cannot any ways be sufficient to attain, I have raised your progenitor of famous memory (and now I hope of more famous memory than before), King Henry the Seventh, to give your Majesty thanks for me. Which work, most humbly kissing your Majesty's hands, I do present. And because in the beginning of my trouble, when in the midst of the tempest I had a kenning of the harbour, which I hope now by your Majesty's favor I am entering into, I made tender to your Majesty of two works, an History of England, and a Digest of your Laws, as I have (by a figure of pars pro toto) performed the one, so I have herewith sent your Majesty, by way of an epistle, a new offer of the other. But my desire is further, if it stand with your Majesty's good pleasure, since now my study is my exchange, and my pen my factor for the use of my talent, that your Majesty (who is a great master in these things) would be pleased to appoint me some task to write, and that I shall take for an oracle.

And because my Instauration (which I esteem my great work, and do still go on with in silence) was dedicated to your Majesty, and this History of King Henry the Seventh to your lively and excellent image