But Mr. Dixon, in his advocacy of Bacon, overlooks the circumstance, that no man could hold high office under James I., without complying with abuses calculated to damage his reputation with posterity. We have no doubt that Bacon's compliance was connected with considerations which Mr. Dixon entirely ignores. Far from discriminating between Bacon the philosopher and Bacon the politician, we have always thought that they were intimately connected. Bacon's Method, the thing on which, as a philosopher, he especially prided himself, was defective. It left out that power by which all discoveries have since his time been made, namely, scientific genius. Its successful working depended on an immense collection of facts, which no individual, and no society of individuals, could possibly make. He himself was never weary of asserting that the Method could never produce its beneficent effects, unless it were assisted by the revenues of a nation. Of the course which physical science really followed he had no prevision. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Gilbert, he never appreciated. He was an intellectual autocrat, who had matured his own scheme of interpreting Nature, and thought, that, if it were systematically carried out, the inmost secrets of Nature could he mastered. His desire to be Lord Chancellor of England was subsidiary to his larger desire to be Lord Chancellor of Nature herself. He hoped, by managing James and Buckingham, to flatter them into aiding, by the revenues of the State, his grand philosophical scheme. Combine the facts which Mr. Dixon has disinterred with the facts which every thoughtful reader of Bacon's philosophical works already knows, and the vindication of Bacon as a man is complete. We are inclined to think that he failed in both of the objects of his highest ambition. His philosophic Method is demonstrably a failure; his attempt to convert James and Buckingham to his views resulted in his own unjust disgrace with contemporaries and posterity. The truth is, that, cool, serene, comprehensive, and unimpassioned as he appears, he was from his youth actuated by a fanaticism which seems less intense than the fanaticism of a man like Cromwell only because it was infinitely more broad. Had he succeeded in the design he proposed to himself, his intellectual domination would not be confined to England, or the kingdoms of the civilized world, but would be commensurate with the whole domain of Nature and man.