£150 per annum, and here I am with the responsibility: a German, I suppose, would spell it with a capital R. And now what have you to say? One thing I really think is promising. I set out with a definite project, not too big or too remote: and if I had not involved myself in a desire to make something of these Baconian letters, which I could not so well do without more leisure and liberty to hunt down my game, I should not have trusted myself to my own guidance with quite so free a conscience. I have already made an entrance into the Lambeth Library and satisfied myself that former editors are not to be trusted; and that a great deal may probably be done by a man who unites two important requisites which have not yet met in any of them, industry and brains. Would you believe, for instance, that there is more than one letter from Francis Bacon to his Mother, and vice versa, which have never been included in any collection of his letters? And that there are many letters between Antony Bacon and his mother relating to the prospects and goings on of the two brothers between the ages of twenty and thirty-five which no biographer of Francis appears to have studied, probably none has ever seen? Mr. Maitland showed me a MS. commonplace book containing a good many anecdotes about Bacon and the people of that time (most of them published I believe in the Apophthegms, etc.) interspersed with memoranda of all kinds, of which he says he can find no account. I suspect it to be Dr. Rawley's private memorandum book; a point which may easily be verified: and if so it will no doubt contain many things which being laid alongside of many other things will throw light upon various obscurities. That such a MS. should be known to exist in the Lambeth Library, and that, after some half-dozen editors have been over the ground in pursuit of Baconiana, it should remain there without anything being known about it, is it not a proof that in fact the ground has yet to be explored? And if so who can say but that among the volumes upon volumes of letters relating to these times which are still preserved in print or in MS., matter may not be found out of which to construct an edition of Bacon's letters that will read as easily and as clearly as a novel. I am sure if it were done properly, it would be one of the most valuable historical and probably the most valuable biographical works that has been produced about these times. For there is hardly any contemporary political question of interest which is not indirectly or directly touched upon at one time or another, and which would not therefore require elucidation. The subject is pursued in the next letter written from Mirehouse ten days later to Thompson, who was still abroad.