Whatever was best and greatest in the works and days of the ancestral Harringtons, seemed likely to be renewed and excelled by the young scholar who bore their name. Primarily, he was a Baconist. There stood the bust of Bacon on the pedestal in his library, and to him it was the treasure of treasures. Wentworth used to say jestingly, that Harrington was a heathen and worshipped an idol. For the idol, however, Wentworth himself, with Muriel, was responsible. Harrington had been sadly disappointed in not being able to find any bust of Verulam at the statuary’s; so Wentworth and Muriel had collected the various portraits of the great Chancellor, moulded from them a bust in clay, somewhat larger than life, cast it in plaster, and one day Harrington, entering his study, was astonished and enraptured at finding the bust there on its pedestal. It was a magnificent success, and well embodied the noble sagacity, the tender and gentle sweetness, the regal compassion and calm, massive intellectuality, which appear in Bacon’s enormous brow and face of princely majesty, as the painters of his time have pictured him. Harrington now loved Bacon with tenfold ardor, and Harrington’s love for Bacon was something wonderful. It was absolutely a personal attachment, and there was no surer way to rouse him than to speak disparagingly of Verulam. He put him above all authors or men. He spoke of him as the flower of the human race. He resented any imputation on his fame, scouted at the modern aspersions upon him of Lord Campbell, Macaulay and others, as baseless and infamous slanders, and altered Pope’s epigrammatic line, which he thought the seed-cone of the whole modern libel, to read “the wisest, brightest, _noblest_ of mankind.” With a standing promise to his friends to put the evidence together some day in demonstrable form, having already, he said, begun to make notes to that end, he meanwhile rested in the broad assertion that Bacon’s downfall was the work of the conservatism of his time—that the conservators of social abuses had smelt out his concealed democracy and socialism, trumped up the charge of malfeasance in office against him, ruined and defamed him in his life and flung the mire of a traditionary calumny on his tomb. It was another of Harrington’s heresies that Bacon in the seventeenth century aimed to do for the world what Fourier aimed to do in the nineteenth. This, he insisted, was the key to his works and life—this the torch by which they were to be read and interpreted. It was evident that Harrington had a very pretty affair on his hands, should he ever venture to publish an idea so heretical. The sin of connecting the world-honored Verulam with the man whom modern society has endowed, as Muriel said, with hoofs and horns and a harpoon tail, and of asserting that either or both had meant to bring the kingdom of God upon the earth, would be only less than the effort of both or either to so interfere with our highly respectable institutions.