Page:Essays of Francis Bacon 1908 Scott.djvu/65

Rh Another portrait of Bacon, not mentioned by Spedding, is now in the National Portrait Gallery. A process print of it illustrates the article on Francis Bacon, at page 214 of Sidney Lee's Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century. The original is a second portrait of Bacon as Lord Chancellor by Paul Van Somer. As a work of art the picture seems to have more character and it is certainly more attractive than the Van Somer at Gorhambury.

In the effort to make a fair judgment of Bacon's moral character, Bacon himself is found to be at once his best advocate and worst accuser. He was inconsistent and he wielded a ready pen. An anecdote of the time relates that Bacon retired to Gorhambury while his trouble was upon him to try to recover there his disturbed health and harassed spirits. On the journey, the story says, Prince Charles returning from a hunt "espied a coach, attended with a goodly troop of horsemen, who, it seems, were gathered together to wait upon the Chancellor to his house at Gorhambury, at the time of his declension. At which the Prince smiled: 'Well, do what we can,' said he, 'this man scorns to go out like a snuff.' " But arrived at Gorhambury, Bacon made the first draft of his will, dated 10th April, 1621, and wrote "the majestic prayer to which Addison refers as more after the manner of an archangel than of a man." Majestic also, easily overtopping the language of all but the greatest of men, is the opening sentence of the will,—

"For my name and memory, I leave it to men's Rh