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278 For a general view of the land in which Lord Bacon lived and died, it is best to ascend the great tower of St. Alban’s Abbey and look around. A goodly prospect lies before one of hill and dale, and wood and lawn, fields of waving corn, rich pasturage for sheep, wild and waste lands, threaded by a narrow stream, the Ver, which winds its way, at its own sweet will, into the river Colne, and by the Colne into the Thames, and so by the Thames into that world of waters, not the German sea alone, but the wide ocean itself. Here, at your feet, lie two of the foundation-stones of the exquisite Cross, where rested the body of Queen Eleanor, wife of Edward I., on its way to Waltham and Westminster Abbey. It was one of twelve crosses so erected, the most touching memorials ever set up by any widower of any wife. In the distant glades, now chequered with sunshine and shade, ran the stately hart of Hertfordshire. Here Peter the Wild-boy ran wild in woods, a savage of the human species; here, at our feet, is the scene of the first battle of St. Alban’s; there, and not far off, the scene of the second; further south lies the field of Barnet; here then, as in a ring fence, were fought three of the decisive battles of the long Lancastrian “jars” of heroic England. Here we have Queen Margaret of Anjou; there the King-maker, Earl of Warwick. Hitchin-wards, was born George Chapman the poet, the learned shepherd of fair Hitchin Hill, and the earliest translator of Homer into English. At Berkhampstead, to the west, was born William Cowper, the poet of “The Task,” and of other noble works, not for an age, but for all time. To your right lies Ware, with its great bed of honour (ask Shakspeare and George Farquhar) and Ware Park, memorable as the residence of King Charles I.’s Sir Richard Fanshaw, the earliest translator of Camoens; whose more than charming wife—a Harrison by birth—lived at Balls, a little to the east of Ware. Who knows not Argentile and Curan, in Percy’s ballads? Its author, William Warner, is buried at Am well, to the south of Ware—the very Amwell which the Quaker John Scott has celebrated in one of the very best of our local poems. Look this way—at King’s Langley lies buried Edmund of Langley, one of the sons of Edward III.; yon New River, finding water for a third of London proper (of which a glimpse may be caught by a Galileo-Dollond), was the work of Sir Hugh Middleton in the reign of King James I.; those Moor Park trees were planted, not a few of them, when Lucy Harrington, Countess of Bedford, the patroness of Ben Jonson and of Dean Donne, was a child. Those pollarded trees were beheaded by Anne Scott, Duchess of Monmouth and Buccleuch, when the head of her husband James, Duke of Monmouth, was taken off by his half-uncle King James II. Those apricots from Moor Park which your imagination may see on their way to St. Alban’s, “with Lord Ebury’s compliments to the Countess of Verulam,” were gathered from trees planted and made famous by George Lord Anson, the famous circumnavigator, and are known and coveted as the Moor Park apricots beyond the fruit shops of Covent Garden, and the dessert tables of the choicest givers of dinners in Epicurean London. Such was and is the land of Francis Bacon; and there at our feet stands the only Christian church actually within the walls of Roman Verulam—the little church of St. Michael, in which Bacon is buried:—

So says, or rather sings good satiric Bishop Hall, a name not unknown to my Lord Chancellor Bacon; and with this couplet on our tongue and ringing in our ears, we descend on a pilgrimage to the untapered shrine of Sir Francis of St. Alban’s.

It is not far off. What is not far off? The burial-place of Lord Bacon. Here is the church, and here—as luck will have it—is the sexton with the keys of the church. We make friends with the holder of the holy spade. We will enter reverentially, by the west door. The dead man was carried this way by human hands to his last home. We cannot enter by the chancel and rush unprepared into his presence. The sexton looks surprised, for we are mute—our thoughts are not with him. One minute more and he is before us—as he sat. There cannot be a doubt that this was he, such as he was in the flesh, and that we are standing, as far as is possible, before him.

A little time, and our lips are muttering, “This, then, is, son to the Great Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Her Majesty’s Solicitor-General, Attorney-General, Bencher of Gray’s Inn, Essayist, and Sir Francis Bacon, knight; in the days of King James (when Scotland ‘condescended’ to accept of England), Baron Verulam, Viscount St. Alban and Lord High Chancellor; in our time, (and for all time) ‘something more and better, ” the Prophet of Arts which Newton is to reveal a century later. Beneath the recess in which this impressive statue is placed rest the remains of Francis Bacon—buried here by his own desire, by the side of his mother, a woman of note in her day, of a remarkable race—a Cooke of Gidea Hill, in Essex, connected by marriage and intermarriage with the truly great of the Court of Queen Elizabeth—

The mighty man

Whom a wise King and Nature chose

To be the chancellor of both their laws

sleeps here—all that could or can die of the man Francis Bacon is entombed here.

The Sic sedebat of the inscription marks it for a portrait statue—if, indeed, proof were wanting of what it is. Look, and you see at a glance a great man among great men:—

With reverence look on his majestic face,

Proud to be less, but of his godlike race.

Again look, and you have before you the thoughtful figure, as he “sat,” of the wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind, the incorrupt servant of Queen Elizabeth, the corrupt Lord Chancellor of King James, the man Bacon, whose name gives an enduring, and if possible an increasing interest to the once corrupt borough from which he thought fit to take his peerage. Ask the sexton how many shillings he receives a year from pilgrims to the grave of Bacon—ask mine hosts of the “Peahen” and the