He was buried in the old town of St. Alban’s, of whose antiquities I have already spoken, and near to which Gorhambury, the country home of Bacon, was situated. The town and region are well worth a visit: and it is one of the few spots whither one can still go by a well-appointed English stage-coach with sleek horses--four-in-hand, which starts every morning in summer from the White Horse Cellar, in Piccadilly, and spins over the twenty miles of intervening beautiful road (much of it identical with the old Roman Watling Street) in less than two hours and a half. The drive is through Middlesex, and into “pleasant Hertfordshire,” where the huge Norman tower of the old abbey buildings, rising from the left bank of the Ver, marks the town of St. Alban’s. The tomb and monument of Bacon are in the Church of St. Michael’s: there is still an Earl of Verulam presiding over a new Gorhambury House; and thereabout, one may find remnants of the old home of the great Chancellor and some portion of the noble gardens in which he took so much delight, and in which he wandered up and down, in peaked hat and in ruff, and with staff--pondering affairs of State--possibly meditating the while upon that most curious and stately Essay of his upon “Gardens,” which opens thus:-- “God Almighty first planted a garden. And, indeed, it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which building and palaces are but gross handyworks: and a man shall ever see, that when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately, sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection.” Surely, we who grow our own salads and “graff” our own pear-trees may take exaltation from this: and yet I do not believe that the great Chancellor ever put his hand, laboringly, to a rake-stave: but none the less, he snuffed complacently the odor of his musk-roses and his eglantine, and looked admiringly at his clipped walls of hedges. _Thomas Hobbes._