Ile of a mon. in ye West as an apt seat state people for it. Cyvil yzing Ireland, furder coloniz. ye wild of Scotl. Annexing ye Lowe Countries. "Yf anything be questio. touch. Poł. to be turned upon yo ampliation of a mon. in the Royalty." After which the note-book passes to other subjects. Of course all inferences drawn from memoranda like these, which were not intended to explain themselves to any one but the writer, are uncertain; but we have other evidence to show that Bacon considered it an essential point of policy to provide the people and the House of Commons with some matter of interest or ambition which they might pursue with the government, and not against it; and that, on that principle, a legitimate occasion for taking part in a foreign quarrel was at all times regarded by him as a fortunate accident. And as we know that the pacific policy of James and his preference of embassies to armies was at the time unpopular, it may well be conceived that a policy aiming apparently and avowedly at the aggrandisement of Great Britain among the nations (the second in dignity, according to Bacon's own estimate, Nov. Org. i. 129., among the ambitions of man) would, if commenced in 1608, have carried popular sympathy with it and entirely altered the relation between Crown and people. Bacon had seen a few years before, in the Parliament which met after the Gunpowder Plot, how rapidly disputes and discontents could be forgotten under the excitement of a common passion; and the same thing was seen not less conspicuously a few years after, when upon the determination to raise an army for the recovery of the Palatinate, a Benevolence was levied, without parliamentary authority and with universal applause; and a double subsidy was voted with unusual alacrity, without delays questions or conditions, by the Parliament which met immediately after. This then I take to have been the "policy" with a view to which he proposed in the summer of 1608 to go on with the treatise of the Greatness of Britain, which it seems he had then begun. How much further he proceeded with it, it is impossible to know: for the manuscript which has been preserved is in a disjointed state, and any number of leaves may have been lost either from the middle or the end without leaving evidence of the fact. I suppose however that he never finished it; finding that the courses taken by the government, then chiefly guided by the Earl of Salisbury, were directly at variance and incompatible with it, and so the chance gone. And he afterwards turned it into a general treatise on the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates; the Latin version of which is given in the De Augmentis Scientiarum (lib. 8, cap. iii.) as a specimen of a treatise De proferendis finibus imperii, and the English will be found (vol. xii. p. 176.) among the Essays. This fragment was first published by Stephens (second collection, 1634, p. 193.) from a manuscript then belonging to Lord Oxford, now in the British Museum: Harl. MSS. 7021. fo. 25.;- the only copy I have met with or heard of. It is a transcript in two different hands, which seem to have been at work at the same time, if one may infer as much from the fact that though the first leaves off in the middle of the page the second begins at the top of a fresh sheet. All of it however, except a few leaves at the end, has been revised and corrected by Bacon himself; and on |