169
hing very important of his occupations before 1589, when he wrote a long pamphlet, "Touching the Controversies of the Church of England." {275b} He had then leisure enough; that he was not anonymously supplying the stage with plays I can neither prove nor disprove: but there is no proof that he wrote Love's Labour's Lost! By 1591-2, we learn much of him from his letter to Cecil, who never would give him a place wherein he could meditate his philosophy. He was apparently hard at scientific work. "I account my ordinary course of study and meditation to be more painful than most parts of action are." He adds, "The contemplative planet carries me away wholly," and by contemplation I conceive him to mean what he calls "vast contemplative ends." These he proceeds to describe: he does NOT mean the writing of Venus and Adonis (1593), nor of Lucrece (1594), nor of comedies! "I have taken all knowledge to be my province," and he recurs to his protest against the pseudo-science of his period. "If I could purge knowledge of two sorts of rovers whereof the one, with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities; the other with blind experiments, and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries . . . This, whether it be curiosity, or vainglory, or nature, or (if one take it favourably) philanthropy, is so fixed in my mind that it cannot be removed." If Cecil cannot help him to a post, if he cannot serve the truth, he will reduce himself, like Anaxagoras, to voluntary poverty, " . . . and become some sorry bookmaker, or a true pioneer in that mine of truth . . . " {276a} Really, from first to last he was the prince of begging-letter writers, endlessly asking for place, pensions, reversions, money, and more money.
Though his years were thirty-one, Bacon was as young at heart as Shelley at eighteen, when he wrote thus to Cecil, "my Lord Treasurer Burghley." What did Cecil care fo