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Unhappily, Bacon was fond of display, and unused to pay minute attention to domestic affairs. He was not easily persuaded to give up any part of the magnificence to which he had been accustomed in the time of his power and prosperity. No pressure of distress could induce him to part with the woods of Gorhambury. "I will not," he said, "be stripped of my feathers."
The engouement about the poet, the search for personal details, did not manifest itself with any vigour till nearly thirty years after 1664 and we are to wonder that the gleanings, at illiterate Stratford, and in Stage tradition, are so scanty and so valueless. What could have been picked up, by 1680-90, about Bacon at Gorhambury, or in the Courts of Law, I wonder.
'Go bring the RABBLE, o'er whom I give thee power, here to this place, was the New Magician's word. 'When Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper, lived, every room in Gorhambury was served with a pipe of water from the pond distant about a mile off. In the lifetime of Mr. Anthony Bacon the water ceased, and his lordship coming to the inheritance could not recover the water without infinite charge.
Michael's Church at Gorhambury, for there is the grave of my mother." Address of Homer B. Sprague, at the laying of the corner-stone of Sage College, Cornell University. For a full and masterly discussion of this subject, its evils and remedies, I must refer to the report on the St. Louis Public Schools for the year 1871-2, by Wm. T. Harris, Superintendent, p. 80 et seq.
But between the time of the first charge and his condemnation seven weeks elapsed; and though he was able to go down to Gorhambury, he never in that time showed himself in the House of Lords.
To the world he kept up an undismayed countenance: he went down to Gorhambury, attended by troops of friends. "This man," said Prince Charles, when he met his company, "scorns to go out like a snuff." But at Gorhambury he made his will, leaving "his name to the next ages and to foreign nations;" and he wrote a prayer, which is a touching evidence of his state of mind
Rustics and rural constables he MAY have lovingly studied at Gorhambury, but for his collection of other very loose fish Bacon must have kept queer company. So you have to admit "Genius," the miracle of "Genius" in your Bacon, to an even greater extent than I need it in the case of my Will; or, like Lord Penzance, you may suggest that Will collaborated with Bacon.
But he kept a large household, and was able to live in comfort at Gray's Inn or at Gorhambury. A man who speaks in his will of his "four coach geldings and his best caroache," besides many legacies, and who proposes to found two lectures at the universities, may have troubles about debts and be cramped in his expenditure, but it is only relatively to his station that he can be said to be poor.
So I continue your Lordship's ever much bounden, "FR. BACON. "From Gorhambury, this 16th of July, 1603." But it was not done. He "obtained his title, but not in a manner to distinguish him. He was knighted at Whitehall two days before the coronation, but had to share the honour with 300 others." It was not quite true that his "ambition was quenched."
Once more he had recourse to Gondomar, "in that solitude of friends, which is the base-court of adversity," as a man whom he had "observed to have the magnanimity of his own nation and the cordiality of ours, and I am sure the wit of both" and who had been equally kind to him in "both his fortunes;" and he proposed through Gondomar to present Gorhambury to Buckingham "for nothing," as a peace-offering.
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