Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/56

Rh and the Inner Temple gave a masque in honor of the event, called The Marriage of the Thames and the Rhine. Francis Beaumont was the author and Sir Francis Bacon the "chief contriver." On January 6, 1614, the gentlemen of Gray's Inn presented The Masque of Flowers, in celebration of the marriage of Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, with Lady Frances Howard, the divorced wife of Essex's son, Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex. Sir Francis Bacon, the new Attorney-General, was the "chief encourager" of this masque, which is said to have cost him £2000.

All this while, during more than thirty years, the great philosophical work of Bacon's life was going on, getting itself written in sketches and treatises, under different subjects, and in separate parts, as time permitted. He had called it as a mere boy Temporis Partus Maximus, 'The Greatest Birth of Time.'  About 1607, the title Instauratio Magna, that is,  'Great Restoration'  appears. When the work finally saw the light in October, 1620, still incomplete, it bore the name Novum Organum, or  'New Organ.'  Within six months after the publication of the Novum Organum, Francis Bacon was overwhelmed in the appalling catastrophe which deprived him at one stroke of position, power, and good fame. He had been created Viscount St. Alban, January 27, 1621. On January 30 Parliament met. Five days later Sir Edward Coke, Bacon's life-long rival, moved that a committee be appointed to inquire into public grievances. Two committees were Rh